Still struggling with assessing, organizing and condensing all the information I’ve been taking in, so my posts here and at Hard News have been sporadic, at best. This situation looks like it will persist for at least another week, so in the meantime, I’m resorting to the old faithful “aggregate and snark” model of blogging.

First, over at Mahalo, here’s a really neat condensation of Steve Jobs’ iPhone 2.0 speech into 60 seconds containing the most relevant bits of information. I know that for the walleyed Apple “f@nb01s” this may be heresy … but I kinda dig the way this was edited.  The quick hits at the end of the vid were definitely a hoot – they really show how much of a “hurry hurry hurry step right up” carnival barker Jobs is…

And now, here’s the link to Hulu having The Daily Show and Colbert streaming from their site.

The article describes what they see as a possible conflict between cable operators and Comedy Central – that having content providers putting their best stuff online is generating that “giant sucking sound” of viewers abandoning the increasingly less-broad “broadcast” offerings.  Viz:

Eventually, if this is not already the case in a small number of instances, it may lead to what’s known as “cable bypass”–individuals may opt to cancel their cable subscriptions.

Nonetheless, it is remarkable just how many TV shows’ full episodes are available on the Internet (with a relatively low commercial load), including most of the top network scripted series and many in cable. Arguably, the only premium broadcast content not available in full online are certain sports events and “American Idol.”

The background image for the Hulu internal page on The Daily Show.

The Daily Show’s page on Hulu looks spectacular. Someone really paid attention to not only eye-pleasingdesign, but to quick & painless navigability.  In fact, the whole front page and user experience of Hulu is worlds better than when I first encountered it back in January.

Man, I love, love LOVE the controls that Hulu has built into its video player.  The pop-out control especially comes in handy for a multi-monitor, multi-tasker like me.  Also, the 5-second pre-roll and associated ad from Honda are absolutely perfect … non-instrusive, not annoying, and I dig the way that they respect me. Can’t believe how much better this is than before.  So far there’s only 76 episodes up of this, but I can see where this is headed.  I wonder if the ad presence there is enough to capitalize all this development right now (I’m guessing NOT at the moment), but if they’re operating under the theory of aggregating the audience/eyeballs right now so that things pay off down the road, this is certainly a strong step in the right direction.