Hulu is one of the leading lights in the fight to get traditional television, and Web television to converge. But as it comes up to it first anniversary, how is it actually doing?

Solutions Research Group recently conducted a study in to the state of Hulu, as reported by TVWeek. It shows the demographic who are watching, and the customer satisfaction ratings.

Struggling To Gain Traction

Most importantly, it seems that despite being heavily promoted, the majority of Americans still don’t know about the Fox/NBC-owned Hulu, with just 15% of the online US population having ever heard of the site.

The last two years have seen online video reach the masses, and grow massively as a result. That trend has continued apace during the first half of 2008, with comScore revealing 12 billion videos were watched in the US during the month of May.

That 12 billion videos suggest a 45% increase on the same period last year, and shows a very healthy growth in online video. This is both from user-generated sites such as YouTube, and those providing streaming television, such as Hulu.

142 Million Uniques

Ars Technica reports that 142 million unique users watched video online in May, which counts for 74% of the total Internet users in the US, meaning 3 out of 4 people have watched some kind of video online.

The Roku Netflix box was released back in May to a mixture of complete and utter enthusiasm, to a feeling that it won’t ever be able to compete with Apple TV, so why bother.

The player launched at the incredibly low price of just $99, and allowed users to stream movies and television from Netflix to their TV using the Instant Viewing feature. It’s been a sales success, with the device already hard to come by.

However, demand for the boxes is likely to increase even more with the news that the box is going to soon be compatible with more content providers than just Netflix, and these are going to be high-profile names.

Hulu is a fantastic service, offering Web television streams of some of the best shows currently on US television. It also has some great classic movies available on it.

Another reason Hulu is rated so highly, and has won so many admirers is the opportunity it offers for embedding, something which ABC still won’t offer even after a much needed update.

However, put the two things together and you run in to a problem, namely that a movie which has been embedded may at some point in the future disappear, and not be available any more.

NBC Direct has been with us now since last November, when it launched as a beta to offer a download service to those people who wanted to catch up with NBC shows.

Working in a similar way to the hugely popular BBC iPlayer, the service promised much but delivered little. And unfortunately, six months down the line that still seems to be the case.

Less Content Than Ever

Ars Technica decided the service was worth a second look now after NBC has had months to improve the process and system, and also add more content to the woefully small amount that was formerly available.

However, it seems that the service has got worse if anything, with less content available, DRM issues still rife, and problems getting the service up and running in the first place.

Each year during May, the television networks present their schedules to advertisers, a ritual which has become known as “Sweeps”.

The viewing figures during May determine the level of advertising revenue the networks can expect to get for the year ahead, and so all the big shows are débuted at this time.

However, this time there is a slight problem, as the sweeps have shown that prime time television in the States has lost six million viewers in a year.

Joint Reasons

There are two reasons for this, the first being the writers strike from the back end of last year and early this year which saw shows take an enforced hiatus and consequently made viewers make the switch to cable television and beyond.

However, the bigger and more important reason, is the increase of viewing options open to people now. From digital video recorders such as TiVo and on demand Web video, viewers now have more choice than ever before.

When Hulu was launched as a joint venture between NBC and Fox last October, YouTube suddenly became their enemy - NBC even deleted it’s YouTube channel and all of the content.

However, it seems there is now an official Hulu channel on YouTube. It was started on March 3rd, but has only now been noticed by The LA Times.

March 3rd places the channel’s launch date just prior to Hulu launching publicly, after it’s trial beta version. So what is a Hulu channel doing on one of, if not the biggest rival it has?