Hey, remember Hulu.com? It was a Web site that sort of came out of nowhere, and offered streaming TV shows from NBC and other networks. It was ad-supported, and free. People liked it. And then, one day, in October, 2009, a completely bonkers TV executive all but killed it with one sentence: “It’s time to start getting paid for broadcast content online.”

What’s wrong with sites like Hulu? Well nothing, per se, except for the fact that they can’t be used anywhere outside of the Unites States. As if other countries don’t want to watch… um, really great shows like “Extreme Makeover” and “The [American] Office”! Perhaps that’s why, then, BitTorrent site EZTV has seen traffic double, mainly from non-American IPs, in the past year? For whatever reason, people want to watch these shows, but since there’s no legal outlet to do so, well, it’s not exactly hard to configure uTorrent or Transmission, now is it?

So I read late last night that pretty much every TV show this summer has crashed and burned. You can attribute that any number of things. One, it’s summer and no one watches TV then. Two, the shows were absolutely terrible. Three, maybe people were watching, but the proliferation of the likes of Hulu have totally messed with Hollywood’s ability to actually count how many people watch its shows.

Quite a polemic we’re dealing with, friends. It seems that, suddenly, the PS3 is no longer able to play Hulu content. I just tried to play the Power Rangers movie on my brother’s PS3, and up pops the message: “Unfortunately, this video is not available on your platform. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

Cable providers Comcast and Time Warner might be late to the Internet video party, but that doesn’t mean they are going to let us enjoy content for free that they pay for. Oh no, the TV Everywhere Model is designed to give Comcast and Time Warner paying subscribers access to content and block-out everyone else. And this system might find its way into Hulu.

You can’t blame the cable operators for their plans. They have to pay good money for access to cable stations. Then they, of course, pass along the cost to subs via a monthly bill. The thought is that those people that pay for the content should be able to watch all of it on both their TVs and computers.

Of course the other side is that if you don’t pay for those services, then you’ll be shut out. This authentication system will be used initially on sites like Comcast’s video site, Fancast, but there is always the possibility that it could eventually make its way on to Hulu.

It’s been about a month since I subscribed to Optimum Online Ultra, the fastest Internet service in the country—sorry, Peter. Consider this a predictable, rubbish explanation of how my Internet habits—nay, my life!—have changed as a result of having a 101 megabits-down/15 megabits-up connection.

“What you can do with the new systems is go directly to the international network computers called *dramatic pause* the Internet.”

I wonder if he foresaw the Internet replacing him way back then? Watch this video. It’s a classic.

The latest issue of Playboy is stating that Hulu support is coming to Roku. Not that Playboy isn’t a reliable technology source, but we’re still a tad skeptical. Hopefully the support is coming though, not for Roku’s sake, but because that would mean TiVo and Moxi shouldn’t be that far behind.

There are few web services hotter than Hulu these days. It’s about to surge into the number two web video position (behind only YouTube) and it just signed a deal with Disney to give it even more great content. It’s all great — if you live in the U.S.

Outside of this country, if you’ve wanted to access Hulu, you’ve either been out of luck, or had to use a proxy server workaround. For several months, there were quite a few options that would work to trick Hulu into thinking you were trying to access it from within the U.S. even when you were not. But Hulu got smarter and started doing geo-checks at the streaming level. But still, a few virtual private network (VPN) creators like Hotspot Shield would get the job done by making your IP anonymous. Not anymore.

Will the Internet run out of bandwidth? That’s the concern expressed by an upcoming study, and it could mean the end of the Internet as we know it. Uselessly slow Web sites (think: YouTube, Hulu), Internet “brownouts” (“please wait: processing request”), and general mayhem could be the norm in just a few years’ time. So let’s freak out about it.

Have you guys used Plex lately? We’ve written about the application, which is a Mac-optimized fork of XBMC, in the past, but didn’t mention its latest update. It’s now known as Plex Media Server, and it’s really a great way to watch movies on your Mac. And now with the Media Server update, it can be outfitted with all sorts of plugins that greatly expand its functionality.

We’ve already shown you one dirty way of re-enabling Hulu on Boxee but now there is an official work around direct from Boxee via RSS. The latest build adds support for video RSS fees and so…all you need to do is add Hulu’s public RSS feed to the app’s reader. It’s surely not as sexy as the past application, but it’s better than nothing. Plus, App Box and auto update show how fast this alpha release is maturing.