Image via We Are NY Tech

Techstars NY graduate Shelby.tv has been pretty quiet since raising $1.5 million in July. But today the young start-up, which aims to provide an immersive experience for watching, sharing and discovering web video, announced that content from the typically isolated Hulu will be available on Shelby.tv. Videos from IAC's College Humor also came online today, along with Tumblr integration.

Shelby is working in a crowded space. It has direct competitors like VHX, which is building essentially the same experience. Functionality for social video sharing is also built into Boxee, which has the advantage of a hardware component that makes it a snap to stream videos to your big screen. And of course giants like YouTube are experimenting with leanback views and social sharing.

CEO Reece Pacheco became friendly with Fred Wilson after commenting on the latter's blog over the course of a few years. Mr. Wilson has been a vocal supporter of Shelby, certainly a strong advocate. Scoring the right to Hulu and College Humor shows, Shelby has the chops to negotiate with the big corporate parents who control these smaller, more open web platforms. Boxee has yet to achieve a deal with Hulu.

As The Next Web's Courtney Boyd Meyers reports, Shelby plans to monetize by offering branded channels instead of traditional ads. "By filtering, Shelby’s branded content will be smart; meaning, Reece will receive Old Spice ads and Shark Week promos, while I’ll be watching branded content from vegetarian cooking shows and Thai tourism boards."

But the future of Hulu is very much in flux. Fox has already put its content on an eight-day delay, and many expect ABC and CBS to follow suit in the near future. The old guard media is planning to squeeze every last penny out of their content while they still retain some modicum of control, which means the rights to premium digital music and video will only be getting more expensive in the next few years. For innovative start-ups like Shelby, this is the great challenge, and opportunity.

Hmmm...where can I find me shows?

A week after Fox made users wait to watch new shows on Hulu for free, tech site TorrentFreak says they've seen a drastic rise in the volume of illegal downloads of Fox shows.

TorrentFreak reported that over the first five days of Fox's service change, Hell's Kitchen saw an over 100 percent rise in illegal downloads compared with three previous episodes, and that MasterChef saw a rise of over 189 percent for the same comparison.

Fox instituted the delay to mollify the cable companies, who pay them the lions share of their revenue in re-trans rights. A week of exclusivity makes these incumbents feel better about the pretty penny they are shelling out for content.

For consumers of course, waiting over a week for a new episode (or making personal schedule changes to catch it in primetime) is far from an ideal or realistic expectation, especially for audiences members who have grown accustomed to on-demand viewing.

TorrentFreak also pointed out that Hulu.com and other legal online content venues had decreased illegal download traffic, proving that a lot of viewers want to watch legally if they can, even sitting through multiple ads online.

Now customers who used to watch their favorite shows on Hulu.com the day after they aired have three options: they can wait eight days for the show to appear for free as usual, they can pay for the content, or they can pirate it online. And after having their content provided for free for years, the majority of the slighted viewer base probably isn't going to line Fox's coffers to have it back.

NBC and the other wait-and-see networks are likely watching very closely as Fox tests the waters of the pay wall. But the real question, as bids come in today from the giants of the tech world who are interested in leveraging Hulu for their burgeoning web TV empires, is whether this will take even more of the sheen off an already-battered brand.

Birds of a feather...

Hulu users who don't pay for the site's premium version won't be enjoying any content from Fox the morning after. Starting today, all Fox shows will be kept off the web for eight days, unless users subscribe to Hulu Plus or prove they pay for Dish Network. Peter Kafka reports that Disney's ABC will be the next major network to put this kind of delay in place.

As Disney chief Bob Iger explained on a recent conference call, most of the network's revenue still comes from the cable companies, and keeping them happy means giving them exclusives the web doesn't have. Here's a transcript of Mr. Iger from Seeking Alpha:

The relationship that we have with the distributors is a very valuable one, and it’s one that we aim to respect by both protecting what we currently have and determining or figuring out ways that we can expand on it.

Our overall approach of late has been to make deals that increase revenue, while at the same time, protect and respect basically the multichannel or the channel distribution value that we see today. So, we’re looking at deals that are largely library in nature, meaning very little if any content that would be in season, mostly prior season. But also, trying to build into at least some of these deals, some form of authentication, [that] … will allow access to our programming faster or in a more aggressive window, if the customer is a multichannel subscriber.

You are right in your assessment that we’ll basically push the window back or make access to the programming more difficult or later, except if customers are authenticated as a subscriber.

Betabeat is of the opinion that the networks that opt to sacrifice some of the revenue from the incumbent cable players now, in exchange for establishing themselves as the fastest, most social, most viral presence on the web, will be the dominant players in five to ten years time. But maybe that's why we run a tech blog, and not a public company.