As we reported earlier today, Disney has signed on to become part owner of Hulu. Posts immediately went up around the blog-o-sphere wondering what it all means. Sure it means something (check out Liz’s list of winners and losers in this deal), but it changes nothing. Well, it changes one thing — Hulu now has three media companies to answer to instead of two.

As the first part of this year demonstrated, Hulu is not the master of its own destiny. In January, at the behest of FX, Hulu pulled nearly all three seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia from the site and issued the following apology on its blog (emphasis ours):

Despite Hulu’s opinion and position on such content removals (which we share liberally with all of our content partners), these things do happen and will continue to happen on the Hulu service with regards to some television series…

Unfortunately we do not have the permission to keep the specific episodes up on Hulu beyond that.

This was followed up in February by the infamous Boxee Rebellion (<– catchy!), that saw Hulu removed its service from the media center platform that made watching its content on TV sets that much easier. From another Hulu blog post (emphasis ours):

Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes. While we stubbornly believe in this brave new world of media convergence — bumps and all — we are also steadfast in our belief that the best way to achieve our ambitious, never-ending mission of making media easier for users is to work hand in hand with content owners. Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner websites.

In both instances Hulu says, in effect, “Hey, if it was up to us, you could have whatever you want, but it’s these dang content partners…” And as it states so plainly: No content, no Hulu.

Now Hulu has one more partner it needs to keep happy. And if you think NBC and FOX are protective of their brands, imagine what the company that owns Mickey Mouse and Hannah Montana will require.

This morning Disney announced it would be joining Hulu, posting full-length episodes of current content from ABC primetime and daytime, ABC Family, SOAPnet and the Disney Channel on the site. The deal, details of which had leaked out over the past couple of months, includes a 27 percent stake in Hulu for Disney, putting it on equal footing with founders NBC and News Corp. So let’s break down how this affects the web television distribution landscape:

Winners

Hulu gets a new two-year lease on life. This was an important re-up, because the site’s incredible momentum had put it on unsure footing, with its content-controlling parents doling out programs more sparingly and pulling it off of cable disintermediary Boxee. Yes, it’s only two years (see Chris’ counterpoint to this piece), but the site will be much more entrenched by then.

Disney, without even giving up all of its content (no ESPN!), gets equal footing with NBC and News Corp in the venture, which took on the initial risk and pain of incubating Hulu. However, the deal takes some of the wind out of ABC.com’s sails. ABC had until now run the only network site that was the exclusive provider of its own shows, and regularly led all networks in terms of on-site streams.

Losers

This deal reflects poorly on YouTube, since the Google-owned site quite clearly had the opportunity to sign Disney in the last couple months and only managed to rustle up short-form clips. YouTube’s statement on the matter is: “More content coming online in more places is a win for consumers and provides further validation of the growth of the online video market.” But the fact is, the site will need to figure out a way to monetize what it does best, and that’s not licensing premium content.

Every other video portal has simply stagnated. YouTube continues to hold onto massive market share — 40.9 percent of U.S. video streams, at last count. Meanwhile, Hulu has showed how a clean UI and some semi-fresh TV content simply tears up the charts. Everyone else just seems irrelevant at this point.

NBC and News Corp had a good idea and gave Hulu the tools and freedom it needed to execute well, but now it seems they won’t get anything special except a line in the history books for their troubles. On the other hand, Hulu allows them to stay relevant; in today’s unstable media world, it’s something that’s actually working.

Paid services from Amazon, iTunes and Netflix will also be negatively impacted as people see Hulu as a more comprehensive content offering, especially considering it’s free. Apple, especially, loses some of the luster of its special relationship with Disney, where ailing CEO Steve Jobs is a board member.

Move Networks was previously the technology provider for ABC.com’s walled garden of full-length episodes. Now Move’s player will be just one of the ways to access ABC content.

The big question marks

Comcast and other cable companies are seeing their core paid distribution businesses get more and more threatened by Hulu, as it starts to fully become the TV receiver for the Internet age. Will the cable companies head to court, like in the UK, where broadcasters’ joint venture Project Kangaroo was deemed to be anti-competitive? You can be sure the giant is no longer sleeping.

Another take was offered by Forrester analyst James McQuivey to CNET (which is owned by CBS): Hulu could actually provide more than a blueprint for cable companies’ own premium video services; it could manage their online content relationships and distribution for them.

“Comcast can tell NBC and News Corp, we want to put your Hulu system in front of our subscribers,” McQuivey said. “But we want to give our customers more. If Hulu is posting four episodes of a show online we want our subscribers to have 12 episodes. I’m 90 percent certain sure these conversations are already happening.

A Comcast spokesperson told us recently, “Generally, I think that we will continue to have a relationship with Hulu if their venture continues to have exclusive super distribution on broadcasting programming from NBC/FOX and potentially others.”

But the real pressure is on CBS. It’s now the last of the big broadcast networks to hold out on Hulu. The hangup seems to be a case of missed connections at this point, since in terms of strategy CBS is right in line with Hulu. In fact, CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith has publicly praised Hulu while pursuing an even more liberal strategy of widespread premium content syndication. If it can get in on Hulu with the same deal Disney got, it seems pretty silly — and incongruous with its own strategy — for CBS to hold out.

Notably, while these deals are worth a lot in the public eye, they don’t add much to the bottom line — yet. Currently the only things with significant dollar tags are pre-existing revenue streams and the promise of what Hulu could be.

Open Google Talk and you know right away whether your friends are logged in, offline or idle — it’s called “presence” and it’s all over the web. By using the same protocol behind instant messaging, demand-response company EnerNOC now hopes to move beyond its core business and bring that same level of awareness to smart meters on the grid. Is it a LOL move?

The Boston-based company on Tuesday launched PowerTalk, which uses the open XMPP protocol — used for instant messaging, chat rooms, and voice and video calls — to monitor smart meters and other devices. Any Internet-enabled device can use PowerTalk, and instead of having the system electronically read the meters, say, every five minutes, PowerTalk enables devices to automatically send their statuses to EnerNOC’s network. EnerNOC is installing the technology in all its new devices and is already using it with more than 250 customers, CEO David Brewster tells us.

It’s an interesting move, given that EnerNOC is one of the largest demand-response firms. Demand-response services help utilities prevent outages by reducing customers’ power usage — at utilities’ request — during times of high electricity demand. Grid operators buy the unused power, and the services and their customers split the cash. With PowerTalk, EnerNOC plans to add services like real-time outage and voltage information so that utilities would know when they had a power outage or a voltage fluctuation instantly. “Utilities don’t know they’ve had an outage until someone calls them up,” Brewster said. “Now they know instantly if the power is out, and would also get instantaneous voltage readings.”

PowerTalk can also make EnerNOC’s current demand-response services more accurate. The idea is that the technology will give EnerNOC more up-to-date information about its customers’ systems, so that grid operators will know exactly how much electricity is available to them through demand-response services at any time. Having this information will make grid operators feel more confident about using demand response instead of power plants to avoid outages, Brewster said. “Grid operators are used to getting feeds from central power stations at second intervals,” he said. “This levels the playing field for demand response, and I think it’s going to play a major role in making grid operators feel comfortable with this resource.”

PowerTalk also has made it quicker and easier to set up new customers by eliminating the need to establish virtual private networks and to coordinate and send out status requests. And whereas meters previously would send a message back every time they received a request, with PowerTalk the meters will only send a message if their status changes, Brewster said. “There’s not a lot of overhead, because it’s not constantly sending ‘I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.’ We’ll just know instantly if anything changes.”

EnerNOC claims that using an open standards-based communications protocol, which has been around for a long time, will make its system more interoperable. But that, of course, depends on whether the rest of the industry signs up to use it, says Jesse Berst, managing director of Global Smart Energy. And with plenty of other potential protocols out there, XMPP will likely face some competition in becoming an industry standard.

The web abounds with free tutorials on applications that I use, but I don’t often have time to spend on complex lessons, which is exactly why I’m finding some of the tutorials at Expert Village useful. The site houses how-to videos that are done in easy-to-digest formats. Expert Village provides how-to content on topics outside the sphere of technology, too, but its tutorials are quite good for commonly used applications. Here are some examples of what you can get out of the site.

It’s free to sign up at Expert Village (though you can view videos without signing up), and the site is search-driven. Do you use Photoshop? It’s one of the more complicated applications around if you really want to get good results. Check out some of the nearly 900 tutorials for Photoshop found here. Via a toolbar, you can sift the tutorials by Most Viewed, Newest and Most Rated. This three-minute video on how to create a slick logo in Photoshop is taught by a professional graphic designer and thoroughly goes through all menu and dialog box choices needed to build a good-looking logo. It gets a thumbs-up from the community rating the videos, but some tutorials get thumbs-down ratings.

Are you a Firefox user? You can find almost 50 useful video tutorials on Expert Village for it, including one on exporting and saving bookmarks and one on finding good extensions for the browser.

Expert Village houses much less content on less popular applications. I couldn’t find any tutorials for a number of open source applications that I use, and I found only a handful of videos on Linux, with none on Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distros.

It’s still worth searching Expert Village, though, if you’re looking for sophisticated content on advanced topics. I found good tutorials on web design, HTML and many other topics. Try the site out if you’re looking for short-format video tutorials on applications you use or want to use.

Where do you turn for tech tutorials?

Hello fellow Apple lovers. I have recently joined TheAppleBlog as a contributor. Allow me to give you all a little background as to who David Klein really is…

My first computer was a Macintosh LC, and I have since been a Mac enthusiast. My latest purchase was a Dell Mini 9 on which I installed OS X (very cool). In high school I worked at an Apple retail chain in Northern California called Computerware. After my first year at Cornell University, I had an internship in Apple’s hardware engineering department in Cupertino’s HQ. Yes, I sat near Sir Stevie several times in the cafeteria. Yes, he is extremely intimidating.

I worked in Cornell’s IT department supporting Mac users over the phone (I don’t recommend ever working tech support over the phone). I was the president of the Cornell University Mac User Group for a couple semesters. Now, I use Macs exclusively as a user interface designer at a startup in Palo Alto, CA. When I needed a few extra dollars to pay for student loans I worked at Palo Alto’s Apple Store nights and weekends. At that store you never know when Sir Stevie will walk in and sniff around to make sure everything is running to his standards.

I was a reviews editor at Powerpage.org for some time, but now I write all about Apple here. My goal is to make you all think about and use Apple’s products and those of its competitors in new ways. Whether or not you agree or disagree with my thoughts or how-to instructions, you should leave comments. I’ll do my best to respond to everyone.

You can get a feed of my articles here: http://theappleblog.com/author/tehdik/

Also, you can find me on Twitter and Flickr.

Below is a picture of me riding the cable car in San Francisco.