Hulu is supposedly opening up shop tomorrow to the general public, at least in the United States. After nearly five months in an escalating private beta, it’s time to take stock of what it does well, what it doesn’t do well, and what I think is its Achilles Heel.

The Good

• Hulu remains free, legal content to viewers, albeit ad-supported.
• From what many in the industry have said, Hulu’s ad strategy is flexible to advertisers and palatable to viewers. For the advertisers: They like professional (predictable) content, unlike the user-generated fare found on YouTube (unpredictable). During certain shows, viewers will be able to choose which commercial they want to watch — an ad for Nissan’s Rogue SUV, Maxima sedan, or Z sports car, for example. For consumers: You can watch an episode of NBC’s “The Office” and sit through only 25 percent of the ads you’d see on the network.
• Hulu, the site, is not cluttered with ads and unnecessary features screaming for your attention. The user interface is pleasant, easy to use, and the video quality is very good.

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Japanese users of Nintendo’s DS Lite portable games console can now purchase and download movies for the device, reports Japan Today.

The new service, dubbed DSvision, is a collaboration between Nintendo, print firm DNP and am3, a digital media distributor. After purchasing the DSvision hardware add-on – comprising of a USB dongle/card reader, 512MB microSD card, and “an adapter for slotting the media into the console’s game port” – users can begin downloading content from the DSvision website via their PC for transfer to the DS Lite. However, the need to “side-load” content seems an unnecessary and convoluted step considering that the DS supports Wi-Fi. In addition to video, the new service will also sell ebooks, digital music and comics.

As promised, the BBC has launched a version of iPlayer for use on Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch mobile devices.

Currently in Beta, the specially designed version of the BBC’s UK-only TV catch-up service utilizes H.264 video streaming (optimized for use over WiFi not the iPhone’s slower EDGE connection) and, as we first speculated, doesn’t appear to employ DRM. The lack of copy-protection technology means that, in theory at least, video streams could be captured to a user’s hard drive and stored indefinitely, bypassing the iPlayer’s current 30 day-only limitation.

Today you can surf the Web to find, and watch, shows you’ve recently missed on television. You can also surf, find, and watch shows you didn’t know you miss.

Shows from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Shows like “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”, “Emergency!”, “The A-Team”, “MacGyver”, “The Twilight Zone”, “Hawaii Five-O”, “Good Times”, “Munsters”, “F Troop”, “I Spy”, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”, “My Favorite Martian”, and so many, many more.

Classic TV has made the jump from cable and satellite TV to the Web, where you can find full episodes and entire seasons of shows you’ve probably forgotten about — but watched when you were a kid. These programs are free and play in the same ad-supported media players the networks use for their current offerings.

The Classic TV trend really became apparent in February when two leading networks, NBC and CBS, put some of their old shows on the Web, joining other retro programs we didn’t know were even there.

We haven’t paid much attention to classic TV on the Web because these programs are already available on TV, somewhere in the dead-of-night cable-sphere, or on DVD re-issue boxed sets. Even so, NBC and CBS are creating branded retro channels — NBC’s is “Way Back Wednesdays” — and putting considerable resources into their efforts, giving new life to Mr. T and Danno.

last100 took a look at what classics are available — there’s a bunch — and what the networks are doing with their old content on the Web.

The Silicon Alley Insider reported late today — in the headline “Confirmed! Warner Bros. TV in on Hulu.com — that, well, the Warner Bros. Television Group will be providing content for the NBC-Fox joint venture Hulu.

But then SAI, and others, soft-pedaled the details. “It looks like … “

It doesn’t really matter now. This deal has been rumored for months (Valleywag), and Warner Bros. TV President Bruce Rosenblum last week said the Hulu deal was “imminent,” according to Communications Daily. Also, Warner Bros., half owner of The CW with CBS, already makes its vast TV library available to AOL’s In2TV.

So the imminent deal means that there will be Warner content — like the CW show “Pussycat Dolls” and Warner-produced “ER” — coming to Hulu, making the online video service an even better place to catch up on TV shows from a variety of networks.

No copy-protection on Sony’s PS3 DVR, PlayTV

First, to everyone’s surprise, Sony introduces DivX support to the PlayStation 3, and now we learn that PlayTV, the company’s yet-to-be-released digital TV tuner and recorder, won’t be employing copy-protection. As a result, television programs can be transfered off of the PS3 onto any device that supports MPEG2, including a PC where they could be re-encoded and shared on the Internet.

Tom, aka Spinner, ends his explanation of why DivX is shutting down its online video service Stage6 by saying, “It’s been a wild ride.”

Yes, it has, for all online video services.

DivX, a digital media company, announced today it is closing Stage6 by Thursday to focus its resources on the company’s core DivX technology/licensing business. Stage6 members cannot upload any more video to the site and only will be able to access content for three more days.

The reason given for shutting down Stage6 is obvious, something faced by all online video sites. “The continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide,” wrote Tom, an employee of DivX, at the Stage6 blog.

In a recent blog post, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Seth Schoen lays out a number of criticisms of Adobe’s push to introduce Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology into its Flash Video and accompanying Flash Media Server products.

If DRM was to become commonplace for Flash Video (the dominant format for streaming video on the Web e.g. YouTube) then it would stifle competition and dramatically hinder the burgeoning “remix” culture that the Internet has spawned, argues Schoen.