Confused? Of course. So was I, when I checked out Hulu’s new “Desktop” app, launched today as part of the video service’s new “Labs” collection of experimental offerings.

Basically, it’s downloadable software that makes it easier than ever to watch Hulu’s shows and clips in the same way that you’d watch TV–on your sofa, remote in hand. But Hulu wants to make sure you don’t actually think it replaces TV.

Note how the company describes it: “A lean-back viewing experience for your personal computer” that will work on Macs and PCs with “standard Windows Media Center or Apple remote controls”–but not with Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Media Center machines or Apple’s (AAPL) AppleTV boxes. And it also isn’t designed to work with any other Web-to-TV software or boxes, like Vudu.

To spell this out: I’m writing this post from the “cave” that the All Things Digital team has set up for the D7 conference, and it’s full of gorgeous 22-inch and 30-inch Mac displays that are much nicer than anything that sits in my cramped Brooklyn apartment. Hulu is saying that they’d be A-OK with me watching Tina Fey and crew, via their service, on those monitors. But they don’t want me trying to get that show on an actual television.

Isn’t a screen a screen? Nope. Not to Hulu’s owners: GE’s (GE) NBC, News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, and soon, Disney’s ABC (ABC). To them, it’s important to make the distinction between TV programming, which generates significant ad revenue and/or cable subscription fees, and online video, which generates very little at all. That’s why NBC CEO Jeff Zucker reiterated his opposition to Boxee, the software that makes it easy to move Web video like Hulu to TV sets.

Now all he has to do is convince tech-savvy entertainment consumers to play along. Good luck!

UPDATE: Several readers have suggested to me that Hulu and its owners aren’t as dumb as they seem, and that they do indeed intend to use Desktop eventually, as a Boxee-like product of their own–that is, they will use it to let people watch Hulu on TV. If so, that means that Jeff Zucker wasn’t being honest when he declared that “right now we’re committed to Hulu being an online experience, and that’s where our vision is today, and I think that will continue.”

But for what it’s worth, whenever I’ve talked to anyone at ABC, Fox, NBC or Hulu, all of them have been consistently mindful about not trying to disrupt the existing value chain that supports the cable and broadcast TV business–“the ecosystem” is the euphemism they prefer. So I don’t find Zucker’s comments so far-fetched.

Anyone want to weigh in? If you use your real name you can sound off in the comments below. Or you can drop me a line at  peter@allthingsd.com.

Entertaining. Like the cadence and the walk. But for my money, the best faux Steve is Fred Armisen, Fey’s old castmate on “Saturday Night Live.” Here he is touting the iPhone:

Sadly, I can’t find Armisen’s best Jobs impersonation, where he introduced the iPod “Inviso.” What’s up with that, NBC.com and Hulu?

UPDATE: Fabio M. Zambelli helpfully passes along this link to the missing clip. He also notes as many of our readers outside the U.S. do, that he can’t watch Hulu clips. The Hulu people say they’re working on it, Fabio!

For a start, MediaMemo notes that even though estimates for people viewing President Barack Obama’s inauguration speech hit record highs–70 million on the Web and 37.8 million on television–a Web view can’t be equated with a television viewer, so those numbers remain just estimates. One way viewership can be visualized, though, is a graph published by Google (GOOG) that shows a huge dip in searches performed while people were viewing the ceremony live. The Inauguration had a profound effect on YouTube as well. Though it was perhaps the only big Web site that didn’t offer a live stream during the events, its users made up for this by uploading videos afterward at the incredible rate of 3.52 videos per minute. To put that in context, when Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin skits were the hottest thing on the Web, users uploaded videos at the rate of 9.9 per hour. BoomTown notes that even though he might have to give up his beloved BlackBerry, the gadget-loving President did get a completely tricked out new Cadillac limo–nicknamed the “Beast”–for his day-to-day ride.

During his speech, when he was speaking of building a healthy American economy, Obama said “it will not come easy or happen overnight, and it is altogether likely that things may get worse before they get better.” This is basically the theme for the first week of earnings. As BoomTown points out, this crisis started in the financial sector, but it has ended up affecting everything, including seemingly healthy companies in the digital sector. The list gets longer every day. For the first time in 14 years, Sony (SNE) expects to report an annual loss–a staggering $1.65 billion–forcing CEO Sir Howard Stringer to plan for more drastic cutbacks than anticipated. He plans to cut 16,000 jobs and close six plants. And Ericsson? Despite reporting better-than-ever fourth-quarter financials, CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg will cut some 5,000 jobs, just in case, to maintain the company’s competitive edge. Digg plans to cut 10 percent of its workforce, but still says it’ll be profitable in 2009. BoomTown liveblogged Microsoft’s (MSFT) second-quarter earnings call and reported the fallout–for the first time in the company’s 34-year history, Microsoft will lay off a significant number–5,000 workers–the most drastic headcount reduction it’s ever seen. BoomTown also published Steve Ballmer’s full memo to the Microsoft troops about the company’s weak financial results and the layoffs to come.

Maybe the only good news in the tech market this week was about Palm, which has been resurrected by its long-anticipated new hand-held, the Pre. Palm (PALM) shares were up 157 percent this past week–to put that in context, the S&P was down 5.9 percent during the same period.

Good news for Windows PC owners, too–and it’s about time. In Personal Technology, Walt Mossberg previews Windows 7 and said that even in beta it blows Vista out of the water. In its finished form, it might even turn out to be a worthy competitor to Apple’s (AAPL) OSX Leopard. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, he answers a parent’s question about monitoring a teen’s Facebook activity. And in the Mossberg Solution, Katherine Boehret looks at some options for avoiding slow boot-up times on your computer.

More next week, when, hopefully, the atmosphere will be a little bit more upbeat.

In this week ramping up to the holidays, good cheer–unsurprisingly–was hard to find. 2008 may well be remembered as the year the econalypse stole Christmas.

Yahoo (YHOO) was bereft of cheer, for sure. BoomTown covered its long-dreaded layoffs and published Jerry Yang’s complete memo to Yahoo staff about the painful process, which began on Wednesday. Ex-Yahoos from all corners of the company declared their preferences (and vented) to BoomTown about the as-yet fruitless search for a CEO to replace Yang, who laid himself off last month. But wait–Digital Daily pointed out a singular moment of misplaced cheer–akin to fiddling while the proverbial Yahoo burns–as the company, uh, celebrated the holidays with a bafflingly lavish year-end party last Saturday–four days before its massive layoffs began.

Digital Daily covered a lot more bad news this week–even some for Apple (AAPL). Belkin, historically the largest exhibitor at January’s MacWorld, announced it won’t be at the convention this year. In addition, registrations for the annual Macfest are down 20 percent since last year. Fairchild became the latest in a long procession of semiconductor companies to lower estimates in the face of dwindling demand, and IPO activity dropped 50 percent in 2008, according to Ernst & Young’s year-end Global IPO Update. What’s that word? Oh yeah, schadenfreude. In a cold bit of circumstance, almost any company can feel a little bit better by comparing itself to Nortel (NT), which lost an astonishing 97 percent of its value this year.

MediaMemo wrote about CBS’s (CBS) appointment with the piper–it spent $1.8 billion on CNET last year, and started paying the consequences this week. The re-org of the entire CBS Interactive group is laid out in Quincy Smith’s memo to its staff. Hulu was hurting this past week, too. Its traffic dropped sharply in the absence of Tina Fey/Sarah Palin viral videos. There was at least one happy anomaly in this week’s news, though: Microblogging site Tumblr brought back memories of the heady early days of Web 2.0, announcing a $4.5 million-dollar round of funding from Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital.

On the Mossberg front, Walt is on a holiday break, but Personal Technology is not. Nick Wingfield sat in for him this week with a column about digital projectors, which are getting smaller and more portable. And in anticipation of Mac-themed holidays for Windows PC users, Katherine Boehret discussed reliable methods of getting data from a PC to a Mac.

Election 2008
Whether or not those voting machines malfunctioned or miscounted votes, Barack Obama was set to become the 44th President of the United States, much to the chagrin of comedians like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who–since the beginning of the McCain/Palin partnership–were handed once-in-a-lifetime material. Between the brilliant “Saturday Night” Live parody sketches of (and by) both Palin and McCain, and Obama’s victory speech, the other big winner (by a mile) was Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. All 500 video versions of the speech generated nearly seven million views. It doesn’t beat the nearly-naked Britney Spears, with over nine million views, but one can dream.

Yahoo
This week, Yahoo (YHOO) was kind of like a high school senior with a prom night dilemma: Since Microsoft (MSFT) backed out of acquisition negotiations earlier this year, Steve Ballmer insists there’s no deal, but there’s a lot of back-and-forth that makes BoomTown wonder. Google backed out of the much-discussed search ad partnership with the company after the DOJ made it clear that it was not going to happen without a fight. The also-much-discussed merger with Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL has not fared much better. According to BoomTown, where you’ll find the straight dope on all of the rumors, all of this (for starters) has turned CEO Jerry Yang into the Internet’s human pinata.
You know what they say: “Play hard-to-get and you won’t get got.”

Econalypse
Rupert Murdoch admits business is worse than he previously thought. Disney (DIS) admits that ad spending has been declining for more than a year. Does that make it official? Either way, reality sinks in further among the non-start-up set–Time Inc. is laying off hundreds and reorganizing the rest. Viacom (VIA) may or may not have layoffs. Among the start-up set, as witnessed at the recent Web 2.0 conference this past week, companies are in survival mode, getting lean for the downturn. Well, not everybody. MySpace’s over-arching theme, judging from this BoomTown video of the giant’s Web 2.0 party, is “Masque of the Red Death.” Party on, Garth–and have a pleasant tomorrow.

On Election Day itself, that statement is more apt than ever. Sites like fivethirtyeight.com and politicalwire.com will provide the virtually up-to-the-minute numbers on every race. It’s a level of immediacy that was hard to imagine before now–but it’s also hard to imagine we ever had it any other way.

Here’s a quick index of AllThingsD’s digital-eye view of the fracas:

• An overview of the tech policies of both candidates.
• Election in your pocket: Walt Mossberg discovered Election ’08, a data-packed app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that uses an algorithmic calculation of who’s winning in each state based on multiple available polls.

Some would argue that this race could be decided by viral video campaigns, rather than strictly political ones. Here is the evidence:

• “Saturday Night Live” was the heavy hitter here, and it was kind of a toss-up whether John McCain and Sarah Palin’s respective appearances trumped the outright parodies of each one.
• Then there was Hollywood’s ironic plea not to vote.
• And Google’s plea (with help from The Donald) to employers for a “Vote Hour.”
• No one came close to Sarah Silverman in terms of outright exhortation, though.

Last but not least, in what might be considered either a digital or a paper story, depending on where you live and vote, ongoing questions about the reliability of digital voting machines persist. Let’s hope this one’s over on Election Day.

As BoomTown has noted, one of the best things to come out of this election has been the very funny and very topical humor that has been on "Saturday Night Live" in this political cycle.

Headlined by Tina Fey's perfect impression of Republican VP candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the offerings from the comedy television show has been biting without stooping to the rank meanness from so many other places by both sides.

Last night, Republican Presidential candidate John McCain--who has been on SNL before (his "John McCain Sings Barbra Streisand" skit was really a gem from that appearance)--was in two skits on the show and did a great job in both.

The first was a really clever opening sketch in which he and Fey as Palin appeared on the QVC cable shopping network, sheepishly explaining that they could not afford to buy time on the major networks as Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama did last week.

Money quote from McCain: "I'm a true maverick, a Republican without money."

Along with a set of "John McCain Pork Knives" and "McCain Fine Gold" (with Cindy McCain as the comely demoer), Fey (as Palin) goes rogue and starts selling "Palin in 2012" T-shirts.

In a second appearance on "Weekend Update," McCain did another nice turn, running through a series of new strategies to win, such as "The Sad Grandpa" and the "The Reverse Maverick."

Here are the videos:

Opening QVC Sketch

Weekend Update

That was fast.

The recent resurgence of "Saturday Night Live," spurred by Republican VP candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin and her comic doppelgänger, Tina Fey, may already be over.

How do I know? Well, there's the gut check--I watched most of Saturday's show, which didn't feature Palin or Fey, and it was a snoozer (the absence of new mom Amy Poehler probably didn't help either).

But we can also gauge the reaction of Internet users, thanks to the good folks at TubeMogul, a small start-up that specializes in tracking Web video views.

While SNL's sketches this season have become watercooler hits in both legal form (NBC.com, Hulu) and not-so legal form (YouTube), this weekend's show isn't making an impact, at least so far: TubeMogul says YouTube users are only trying to post SNL clips at the rate of about one per hour, since the show aired Saturday night.

That's down from an average of about six per hour for the other shows SNL has aired this season.

Could it be that NBC--owned by GE (GE)--is just doing an extra-zealous job of keeping illegal copies of its clips off of a video site owned by Google (GOOG)? Mmmmmmaybe.

But probably not: Last Thursday's SNL special, which featured not only Tina Fey, but also show veteran Will Ferrell as President George W. Bush, was a huge YouTube hit, generating 9.5 videos per hour and 1.85 million views in 24 hours.

Meanwhile NBC.com's own data confirm that this weekend's show fell flat: The site says the two political clips posted below have generated a mere 460,000 views since Saturday.

Compare that to Thursday's showstopper, currently at 1.5 million and counting.

I'd bet the remainder of our 401(k) that SNL's staff and cast are going to vote for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama next month.

But the bean counters behind the show are obviously rooting for the ticket of Sen. John McCain and Palin.

Once again, it is likely to be more popular online than on television, as it has been for all of the sketches, a striking trend for the long-running comedy show.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin did a very smooth--if a tiny bit sweetly awkward--job in her appearance on "Saturday Night Live" last night.

It was a good decision to go low-key and also do a bit of stunt casting by bringing in Mark Wahlberg, who was mocked in an impersonation last week by SNL, and also Alec Baldwin.

The well-known liberal actor did a nice turn pretending to insult Palin, while thinking she was his "30 Rock" co-star Tina Fey, whose many turns at impersonating Palin have become a huge Internet hit.

Palin came on again later in the NBC television comedy show on its "Weekend Update," rocking out to a perfect rap by a very pregnant Amy Poehler.

These two from SNL will surely be the biggest Web video hits this week.

And, goodness gracious, do Palin and Fey really look alike, passing by each other at the end of the opening skit without speaking.

Sometimes politics can be really ugly and sometimes silly--and this time Palin managed to poke fun at herself without being either.

You betcha' she did.

Here's the two videos from last night and also the other three that already aired on SNL:

Opening:

Weekend Update Palin Rap:

VP Debate:

Interview with NBC's Katie Couric:

With Sen. Hillary Clinton:

As former Disney CEO and online video investor Michael Eisner said in a recent onstage Q&A appearance about what works for video on the Web: “Sex seems to work. User-generated, sports, news, anything with Sarah Palin works.”

Indeed, anything with Sarah Palin.

Besides the huge amount of spoof humor videos that have popped up everywhere, both professional and amateur, as well as the explosive number of viewings of online videos of Tina Fey impersonating the Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor.

Here is the latest Internet effort, an unusual interactive site called PalinAsPresident in which you click on various items in the Oval Office, where Palin is sitting behind the desk, to hear funny remarks from her.

Click on a globe and you hear “SomethingStan.” Click on a poster for the film, “Maverick,” and you hear, naturally, “maverick.” Of course, there is a pit bull wearing lipstick inside the desk.

Keep clicking on the door and you get three different images. But don’t click on the deer the third time–trust me, it is much worse than the fate that befell Bambi’s mom.

Also, don’t click the red phone twice, or it’s curtains for us all. As the spoof Palin says: “Uh-oh!”

Apparently not, from this aggressively pro-Sen. Barack Obama video that has become a huge hit on the Web and seen by many millions of viewers.

It’s called “The Great Schlep,” which is also a political advocacy organization she supports.

In it, the viciously funny Silverman plans to blame–I am not kidding–old Jewish grandparents if Democratic nominee Obama loses the Presidential election. And she advises a very clever kind of blackmail as a way to prevent it.

You have to experience her logic to understand–and please be aware that Silverman pulls no punches.

And, if Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin goes on “Saturday Night Live”–as is rumored–to impersonate Tina Fey, BoomTown will get it right up.

Here’s the video (and below it, the other huge hit online spoof video Silverman did about her–um–friendly relationship with actor Matt Damon):

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

The third time is charming, in fact, as has been every appearance on "Saturday Night Live" by Tina Fey impersonating Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

This one, of course, is on last week's debate between Palin and Democratic VP candidate, Sen. Joe Biden, with Queen Latifah also doing a perfect double-taking turn as moderator Gwen Ifill.

Whatever happens in the election, of the many impersonations on "SNL," Fey's of Palin is a classic, which started with a striking resemblance and has turned into a perfect union of characters.

Here is the first, with Fey and Amy Poehler as Sen. Hillary Clinton and Fey with Poehler playing CBS's Katie Couric.

Here's the new video:

• First and foremost, this week’s big slide on Wall Street hit tech stocks with a vengeance, too, disproving Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s assertion a little more than a week ago: “My guess is that the drama is New York and not here.” Ouch. But don’t say BoomTown didn’t warn you.
• Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s new general counsel, has “strong ties to the Republican Party.” Including a stint in former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s office, where, as chief of staff, he handled the government’s response to the the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s indentity. “Ted’s arrival demonstrates we’re a little more grown up.” No word on whether or not you need to change your status immediately.
• Unsurprisingly, the ad partnership between Yahoo and Google is on hold so the Justice Department can spend more time reading the small print. The much debated deal is now also much delayed.
  Google will spend the interim rolling out Clean Energy 2030, a $4.4 trillion dollar plan to transition the country from coal and oil dependence to clean energy. And to lower the gas and electric bills on all those Google data centers.
• People have some strong ideas about the term “cloud computing”–if not about the concept itself. In September, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said, “Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anybody is talking about … It’s complete gibberish.” Well, Steve Ballmer doesn’t think so–though what he coyly announced this week at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference will go by another name. Or maybe not. Says Ballmer: “Let’s just call it for the purposes of today ‘Windows Cloud.’” Let’s.
• Walt Mossberg lays out the different ways to make a Mac emulate a PC, including one option that’s just gotten better. He also answers readers’ questions, which this week include issues about following features from one version of Microsoft Office to another, dealing with malware, and embarrassing CD misidentifications.
• And in a showdown at the iTunes Corral, Apple walked off into the sunset with its profit margin intact. It was threatening to shut down the iTunes Store if the Copyright Royalty Board were to raise royalty rates 66 percent–as had been proposed by the National Music Publishers’ Association.
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081004/weekend-update-100308/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080930/okay-tina-feys-return-as-sarah-palin-is-too-adorkable-to-resist/ http://allthingsd.com/20080930/okay-tina-feys-return-as-sarah-palin-is-too-adorkable-to-resist/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:39:47 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=4604 How did we miss this one from Saturday Night Live this past weekend?

If you are feeling bad about the tech stock meltdown yesterday, this spoof–the second hysterical one from the comedy television show–video by Tina Fey as Alaska Governor and Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin will make you feel much better.

I am only a millimeter away from writing in “Fey for President” on my ballot for this perfect impression, although Amy Poehler’s take as the pompous Katie Couric of CBS is Fey’s perfect foil (as she was when playing Sen. Hillary Clinton the week before).

The best line was actually from Poehler: “It seems to me that when cornered, you become increasingly adorable. Is that fair to say?”

It’s fair to say this pair does, without crossing the line to rank meanness like a lot of political satire.

Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080930/okay-tina-feys-return-as-sarah-palin-is-too-adorkable-to-resist/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20080915/as-promised-tina-fey-as-sarah-palin-as-tina-fey/ http://allthingsd.com/20080915/as-promised-tina-fey-as-sarah-palin-as-tina-fey/#comments Mon, 15 Sep 2008 09:38:57 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=3772

While you might have seen it everywhere by now, BoomTown promised this would actually be the last post of the multitude of video spoofs about Alaska Governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin that have popped up on the Web of late.

Thus, here is Tina Fey’s version–which, as I expected, is the best–of Palin on “Saturday Night Live” this past weekend. She is joined by Amy Poehler, who does a perfect slow-burn impression of New York Senator Hillary Clinton.

The parody deftly managed to be funny without being sexist–even though it mocked the issue of sexism in politics–although some surely will accuse it of being so. They’re wrong.

In any case, the best line was actually Fey/Palin’s interpretation that global warming was “just God huggin’ us closer.”

While Palin did not give an official reaction to the much-anticipated comedy sketch, reporters on the campaign trail reported she did watch it and overheard her comment that she once dressed up as Fey for Halloween.

Life is truly stranger than fiction.

Here’s the video, which will doubtless be one of the most popular on the Internet this week:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080915/as-promised-tina-fey-as-sarah-palin-as-tina-fey/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20080912/the-very-last-online-sarah-palin-spoof-well-post-until-the-tina-fey-one-of-course/ http://allthingsd.com/20080912/the-very-last-online-sarah-palin-spoof-well-post-until-the-tina-fey-one-of-course/#comments Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:21:33 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=3721

Last week, BoomTown posted just some of the many, many online video spoofs of Alaska Governor and Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Gov. Palin, one of the more colorful political figures to pop up in years, is like the gift that keeps on giving to the Web comedy world, which seems to be churning out video after video of impersonations of her.

Here’s the best I have seen so far, by well-known actress Gina Gershon–who actually looks like her–on the most excellent Funny or Die comedy Web site.

And there will doubtless be more to come–apparently, “30 Rock” star Tina Fey (who is Palin’s true doppelgänger) will be doing her own version of Palin at her old stomping grounds of “Saturday Night Live” this week.

Until then, here’s the Funny or Die video (warning–as you can see below, there is a rifle and a bikini, but it actually works):

See more Gina Gershon videos at Funny or Die
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