• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, March 12, 2008

Hulu, the online video initiative of News Corp. and NBC first announced one year ago, went live this morning with a slate of hundreds of TV shows and movies.

Programs run the gamut from old black-and-white favorites like "The Dick Van Dyke Show" to current shows like "30 Rock," while movies include Sundance hit "Waitress" and David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive."

Much of the press coverage has presented Hulu.com as a competitor to YouTube, but the site actually seems more like a rival to AOL's in2TV, which launched two years ago with a roster of old TV shows. YouTube, by contrast, still seems more the destination for short clips -- music videos, parodies, mash-ups and the like.

The ad model also seems to mimic AOL's in2TV -- that is, it's similar to a traditional TV model, but with shorter, and fewer, ads. Some pre-rolls on Hulu.com this morning were around six seconds long. Hulu displays around two minutes of ads per 30-minute program.

In addition to the sheer quantity of Hulu.com's offerings -- around 250 TV programs and 100 movies -- the quality of video on the site also is impressive.

Still, the question remains, how big an audience is there for reruns? And how much does that audience shrink, once you factor in that the shows are only available as Web streams, which severely limits multitasking potential. That's not to say that these services won't work. Hulu.com -- like its rivals -- probably will draw some viewers and ad revenue. But it's hard to see how any online site offering full-length streams will become hugely popular until there's a simple way to transfer the shows to large, remote-operated TV screens.