Hulu Gets Tagged To Help You Find TV Content Quickly

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We have spoken in length about innovations in your bog standard tv set, that will turn it into a multimedia entertainment hub. The humble television set will soon be no longer be just a vehicle for tv broadcasts and recorded video or a console display. Your TV is morphing into a Internet enabled computer that happens to show tv shows. Its becoming like your PC and smart phone, delivering on demand news, streams, information, entertainment and games. The driving force behind this is software platforms from companies like Yahoo Widgets, Adobe and Roku that are encouraging developers to build apps that can run on multiple TVs.

It's not the first time companies have hoped to bring the Internet to televisions - remember WebTV? - but many of the leading players feel like they're finally touching on the formula to get it right. And they feel that apps and widgets - programs designed for a large screen without some of the clutter of a traditional Web browser - are the answer.

"This is a major transition happening with TVs," said Matthew McRae, vice president and general manager of product group at Vizio, the No. 1 LCD TV-maker in the United States. "TVs have moved from black and white to color and then to flat panel. This is the next evolution, from a display that sits on the wall to a product you interact with."
Some televisions have had direct Internet connections for a few years, and companies such as Panasonic and Sony have tried to pack in programs that take advantage of the connectivity. Game consoles, Blu-ray DVD players and set-top boxes have also brought connectivity to TVs in recent years.
However, now we have software platforms like the Yahoo Widget Engine, developers can now write programs for a wide number of TVs that can pull Internet data and provide users with some of the customized Web experience they get from iPhone apps. Yahoo's software platform boasts about 20 apps now that are being bundled with new TVs from Sony, Samsung, LG and Vizio.

There are a few hurdles to cross first though, including the fact that many current televisions cannot display widgets or connect to the net. And the fact that the current price of these new age tv sets is around $1000 which makes a set-top box like Roku seem a bargain as it delivers the same kind of experience.

As free tv website Hulu grows in leaps and bounds, so does the quantity of streams, tv shows and movies available. To help viewers navigate this maze of content, Hulu have added a tags feature to help you find what you want to watch.
Hulu's existing search feature is pretty good already, but finding what you want if you have forgotten the title or discovering new streams can be a pain. But now, Hulu is going to make finding and discovering that much easier by adding support for user submitted tags.


Tags are all over the web already aiding browsers in categorizing content and also finding related content. We all use tags already when bookmarking websites, creating music playlists and organizing photos albums etc.
Hulu revealed that it is launching a user generated tagging system to facilitate content discovery, because its video catalog has now "grown to a size where tags will prove extremely useful": "Those of you who are heavy users of the Web are likely already familiar with the benefits of tags as both a classification system and a discovery tool," the posting-authored by Hulu product manager, Varun Narang stated. "With the Web sprouting up in random directions so quickly, you could say that a bottoms-up classification system like tags was made for the Web (and in large part, it was). It doesn't depend on any single authority to function, yet from the varied activity of millions of users, an organic, flexible, and useful order emerges."
"On each video or show page on our site," the blog post continued, "you'll find a list of tags near the bottom of the main page or in the ‘Tags' tab to the right of the ‘Discussions' tab. Simply check the box next to any tags you think are appropriate to that video or show, or use the ‘Add Tags' entry box to add your own. Click on any tag or enter a term such as ‘comedy' in the ‘Search with Tags' box to discover other videos with that tag on Hulu. Narrow your search results by adding related tags-for instance, add 'satire' to your comedy tag search to find videos tagged both ‘comedy and satire.' Click on ‘Your Tags' to see all videos that you've tagged. Filter the list of all your tagged videos by selecting one or more of your tags listed in the left column. Using this feature you can create custom collections of videos." Hulu says that it plans to filter out any profanity in user-generated tags.
The tags—which anyone can add to any video, and have "voted up" by other users—work as a kind of public catalog of what's happening in each video. Say for example your looking for the episode of Family Guy where there is a chicken suit fight, then someone will have tagged chicken fight to that episode. Thats kind of how it works, so get tagging.

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