Download Squad's Grant Robertson has been interviewing up a storm down at South by Southwest. He just hooked up with Micah Baldwin of Lijit to talk about how blogs and trusted friend networks can lead to more relevant, more personal search results. The biggest surprise to me was that Lijit isn't supported by Wordpress yet. Micah's encouraging everyone to email Automattic and get them to change that.

We're in the thick of it at SXSWi 2009! Our own Nik Fletcher unbags and disects the official South by Southwest bag full of goodies. Keep your eyes peeled from more from Austin and, if you happen to be here with us, hit us up on Twitter and meet up with us in person!

I don't have a good history with YouTube sites for kids. My first experience was with TotLOL, where I found the selection of videos lacking and had my wits nearly destroyed by that green gummi bear video. Today I decided I had recovered enough to brave the wilds of the kid-vid genre and check out Kideo Player.

I have to admit, it totally won me over.

Kideo Player is curated by a father of two, and his taste is videos is a lot better than the spotty results you get from community moderation. The curator has a stake in the videos he selects, because his own kids watch them. Minimizing parental annoyance seems to be a priority, too: think Sesame Street, not nightmarish gummi bear. The library of videos seems to lean heavily toward educational material: I saw sign language, Spanish lessons, and animal vids when I was watching.

Kideo Player also has a more attractive, more kid-friendly design than Totlol (the dog and cat mascots are seriously adorable), and controls that even a two-year old can use by himself. Hitting spacebar skips to the next video. That's the only thing a kid has to learn to use the site. All in all, this is exactly the video site I would have wanted if YouTube had been around when I was a little kid, and probably the site my parents would have wanted, too.

Online video site Hulu opened its doors to the public (in the US, anyway) a year ago today. Since then, Hulu says its video library has grown 333 percent from 12,000 videos to 40,000 videos. It'd take you 7,1000 hours to watch it all. The site now has 130 content partners, which is more than twice as many as it had a year go. And the number of advertising partners has nearly quintupled.

Of course, the site has also begun limiting the way users can access videos. When Hulu launched, the company was pretty hands-off with web sites and services that embedded Hulu videos. After all, unlike YouTube, Hulu doesn't display advertising on its web site. Instead, video ads are embedded in each video and whether you're watching videos at Hulu.com or Download Squad, you still watch the ads. But in the last few weeks Hulu's content partners have pressured the company to shut down access to third party applications like Boxee that allow users to watch easily Hulu videos on a TV set.

In other news, Hulu has begun rolling out social features that could be either pretty cool or pretty creepy. Registered users can check a box that will allow their friends and contacts to see what they're watching on Hulu. On the one hand, it could be a nice way to share ratings, compare notes on TV shows and movies, and engage in a discussion. On the other hand, do you really want all of your Facebook, MySpace, or email (Gmail, MSN, Yahoo!) contacts to know what you've been watching?

If you've got a huge movie collection, whether it's physical DVDs and Blu-Rays or just movies ripped to a hard drive, Multiplex can help you keep track of all of them on your Mac. Its Leopard-like interface uses Apple's latest Core Animation improvements and looks like an even more epic version of Cover Flow. Instead of a pile of CDs, like in iTunes, you're looking at a wall of DVDs.

Multiplex is pretty sweet, but it's not at version 1.0 yet, and there are areas where it could get sweeter. It will recognize DVDs when you insert them, up to a point. Although the search box is auto-populated with the name of the DVD, you still have to search by name or UPC for the right movie. Delicious Library creator Wil Shipley solved this problem by turning the built-in iSight into a barcode scanner. It will be interesting to see what Multiplex comes up with for quicker entry of DVDs.

Also, all the visual effects can be a drawback if your Mac isn't top-of-the-line. My last-year's-model Macbook choked a little bit once I got my library up to larger sizes. For serious movie fans with serious machines, though, the visual appeal alone makes Multiplex worth a look. The metadata search also works rather well, and it returned the movie I was looking for as the first result every time. Bottom line: if you're a DVD collector, you can trust Multiplex to get the cataloguing job done.

Well that certainly didn't last long. This morning media center application Boxee launched a new build that has an integrated RSS reader that lets you watch online videos tied to an RSS feed. In other words, you can subscribe to RSS feeds for sites like YouTube, Google Video, and Hulu. You know, the site that asked Boxee to stop serving up its videos a few weeks ago.

The Boxee team figured that since the new build didn't mess with Hulu's service in any way, but simply used the publicly available RSS feeds to pull in videos just as you would if you were using a web browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer, that all would be kosher. Apparently they were wrong. Hulu today blocked access to Boxee's browser.

The move shouldn't be surprising. If the content owners that provide TV shows and films to Hulu didn't want Boxee serving up its videos in February, they don't want it doing so today either. Ultimately this means that Hulu's backers don't want to make it easy to watch the internet videos hosted on the site on your television. They'd rather you watch them the old fashioned way. You know, on your DVR while zapping past the commercials with your remote control.

A few weeks ago media center Boxee was forced to remove content from Hulu, and the request of some of the TV and film studios that produce the bulk of the content available on Hulu. Now Boxee is offering a new build that has a workaround that seems to be within Hulu's terms of service, and which may therefore be salvageable. Maybe.

Here's how it works. Boxee has launched a new build of its media center suite that includes an App Box, which is basically an App Store allowing users to find and install new applications and plugins. There's also a built in RSS reader optimized for feeds with video. It works with YouTube, Yahoo! Video, and Hulu.

In other words, as long as Hulu provides RSS feeds for its videos, you'll be able to find and watch them using Boxee. It's not as elegant a solution as the old built in Hulu support. But it will let you navigate Hulu using a full screen interface and a remote control instead of your keyboard. Unless Hulu eliminates its RSS feeds.

The new version also adds a much-needed auto-update feature.

The latest build is considered a "bleeding edge release," which means there may still be some (or a lot of) bugs to work out. The new version is currently available for Mac. No word on the Linux or Windows versions.

Update: The Linux version of Boxee should get the new features in a release scheduled for March 24th.

Update 2: Well, that didn't last long. While it's certainly nice to have a built in RSS reader, you can no longer use it to watch videos from Hulu. The site has blocked Boxee's browser.

Elisa is an open source media center application that looks and behaves an awful lot like Apple's Front Row software. The program was initially developed for Linux, but in January the Elisa team released the first version of the application that can also run on Windows.

The media center suite includes a full screen interface for interacting with your music, movie, and picture collections. Elisa also supports plugins, including tools that let you access online media from Shoutcast, Yes.fm, YouTube, and Flickr.

YouTubeReloaded is a quick and easy way to generate YouTube playlists to embed in your own site. It features a few different skins, the ability to add a logo, and a number of ways to get playlists.

Sure, you could just paste video URLs yourself for a custom playlist, but YouTubeReloaded also offers search-based and predefined options you can use to generate a playlist automatically.

The search-based function is probably the coolest thing about YouTubeReloaded. If you want a player with, for example, episodes of your favorite web show, it's way faster to add them via search than it is to pick them out and paste them all in by hand.

Other handy options include autostart, shuffle and different player sizes.

The last time Download Squad took a look at MyMediaPlayer, Christina praised the concept of an Adobe AIR-based Hulu viewer, and the ability to watch shows and search for new ones at the same time. She also knocked MyMediaPlayer because it only showed the embedded versions of Hulu videos, which meant a serious restriction on viewing quality.

MyMediaPlayer 2 fixes that issue, adds Linux support, and is visually more appealing than the previous version.

Some of the new features in MyMediaPlayer 2 include a guide page for quick browsing of shows and movies, a full-screen TV listing mode, and, most importantly, full-screen video.

Since MyMediaPlayer shows Hulu content uncut and with all the ads, the main incentive to use it over your browser is the addition of nice little UI touches like these. It also only shows only full-length movies and shows, so you don't have to browse Hulu's endless clips for full episodes they don't carry.

Over the last few days, Hulu has pulled its streaming TV and movie content from TV.com and Boxee. The move has sparked a lot of criticism, and a lot of theories about what's actually going on. It's clear from the attitude Hulu CEO Jason Kilar is taking that this wasn't his idea. Rather, content owners seem to have requested the move. So what are they up to? Boxee and TV.com were allowing users to watch videos using the same terms as Hulu: The ads remained intact, so content owners should have been getting paid either way.

PaidContent speculates that the TV.com dispute might have been over the rights to display CBS videos on Hulu. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports today that cable companies are considering launching their own streaming video services as a value added proposition for subscribers.

Now Netflix CEO Reed Hasting is hinting that his company might launch a streaming video-only service later this year or early in 2010. Right now if you want to watch streaming videos from Netflix you need to pay at least $8.99 for a plan where the company will send you one DVD at a time using that old fashioned mail doohickey.

This week's Retro Video is a short history of ENIAC, which was "born" on February 15, 1946. On that day ENIAC's immense banks of vacuum tubes, crystal diodes, relays and other electronic parts were warmed to a crispy golden brown as ENIAC set to the task of calculating how best to turn humans a crispy golden brown. Happy Love Day!

Hot on the heels of TV.com, cross-platform media application Boxee will be removing all video content from Hulu Friday. Apparently Hulu's content partners are becoming less than pleased with the way third party web sites and applications are using Hulu content. Which honestly makes just about zero sense.

What sets Hulu videos apart from the TV episodes you can download for free from BitTorrent trackers is that Hulu includes ads and requires you to be sitting in front of a computer with an active internet connection in order to watch. In other words, Hulu and the studios that own the rights to the videos you're watching are able to make money off of the videos you watch. And that's true whether you're watching videos at Hulu.com, TV.com, or using a third party application like Boxee.

Apparently the folks at Hulu aren't particularly pleased with the situation either. In a blog post, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar says the company is only asking Boxee to remove content because of requests from content owners.

There are still a few other third party apps that still provide access to videos from Hulu. But it's anyone's guess how long they'll be around.

Last month TV.com relaunched its web site as a video portal with full length streaming episodes of TV shows, social features, and IMDB-like info about TV show casts, episodes info, and other information. TV.com is owned by CBS, so obviously CBS content was available, but the bulk of the full length episodes were provided by Hulu -- until today.

It appears Hulu has removed its content from TV.com. And it looks like the move happened on short notice, because when you go to the page for a show that was provided by Hulu, there are still links to play the episodes. You just wind up staring at an unpleasant "Video unavailable" message once you click the link.

It's possible that CBS is planning to broker its own deals with the studios in order to increase the amount of ad revenue it receives (instead of splitting it with Hulu). But that wouldn't explain the whole Video unavailable fiasco.

Update: Hulu has released a brief statement that doesn't really say anything. But Hulu is also asking Boxee to remove its video content due to a request from Hulu's content partners.

Have a boring data entry job that's going to take a few hours (or a lifetime) and looking for a way to make it more interesting? Double Vision lets you watch online videos while conducting other business with your computer.

Here's how it works: You launch Double Vision and a standalone web browser based on Internet Explorer opens. Find a video you want to watch and then click the "Double Vision" button. Most of the browser's navigation toolbars will disappear and all you'll see is the video, a transparency slider and two buttons. Slide the transparency bar all the way to the right and the video becomes opaque, slide it all the way to the left and you won't see it at all. When it's somehwere in the middle you'll be able to see the spreadsheet or other documents you've been working on under the video.

You can click the X button to return to browser's normal mode, or hit the other button if you want to drag and drop the video window to another location. All other clicks in the browser window will go unregistered. In other words, you won't just be able to see whatever's lying under the video, you'll be able to input data, edit documents or watch two movies at once if that's your cup of tea.

Double Vision is optimized to work with a handful of online video sites including Hulu, YouTube, and Netflix. That means when you load a video using the browser from one of these sites, the video will expand to the size of the browser so you aren't stuck looking at a video surrounded by text.

You can also hit Ctrl + Esc to hide the video quickly, which could come in handy if you're using Double Vision at work and you forgot to tell the boss about your ingenious new discovery.

[via The How To Geek]