Hulu touts about TV anytime, anywhere. But hooking your TV to the Net? Crazy talk!

Funny pages: Hulu offers web video, but doesn't encourage Net TV. Image: Hulu

I had an epiphany early last year when I visited Hulu for an article David Kirkpatrick and I were writing about the unexpectedly successful young venture.

Watching TV shows on Hulu was such a pleasant experience with Hulu that the company should encourage users to connect their PCs to televisions. Technologically it's not a difficult thing to do, but it's not terribly convenient. A PC needs to be near the TV, the remote-control experience isn't good, and so on. I remember Hulu executives smiling kindly at my suggestion but not offering much in the way of feedback.

With hindsight, I see how naive I was.

Hulu's owners are Fox Televion (a unit of News Corp. (NWS)), NBC Universal (controlled by General Electric (GE)), and, more recently, Disney (DIS), which owns ABC. The last thing these media conglomerates want is for their Webby startup to go around encouraging people to watch Internet videos on their TVs.

Technology is not the problem

Internet ads are small potatoes compared with TV spots. Online advertising may be growing, but it doesn't replace the big bucks from broadcast, cable and satellite TV. Hulu talked a good game about doing what was right for consumers, and it did build nice video viewing software on the Web. But when it comes to encourage folks to  use Hulu on their TVs? No way.

So as we head into 2010 the long-assumed dream of an "Internet bypass" or "over-the-top video" remains just that, a dream.

Consider:

* Boxee, a startup whose software makes it easy to connect TVs and PCs has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with Hulu for the very reasons described above.

* Apple (AAPL) has had next to no success with Apple TV, a niche product that enables TV viewing of videos in an iTunes playlist — and nothing else.

* Sony (SNE) recently introduced an Internet-enabled TV with the promise of customers being able to  purchase a Sony movie. Yet the movie comes with an exorbitant price tag so as to avoid upsetting Wal-Mart, the nation's largest seller of DVDs and therefore an important Sony vendor.

These are all baby steps for something that, technologically at least, seems inevitable. As Richard Greenfield of Pali Capital  told The New York Times: “The time when a majority of consumers have Internet-enabled TVs is a long way off. “But it’s moving the ball in the right direction.”

Why does it have to be so hard? That's easy. Incumbent video providers will hold on to their diminishing profit margins as long as possibly can even while saying they are embracing new technology, like Hulu. Introduced eight Bravia models that are Internet-enabled won't solve the problem.

What will?

His net worth shot up to $5.4 billion Wednesday, only partly thanks to Apple

Image: Fortune

In September, Steve Jobs' $5.1 billion earned him the No. 43 spot on Forbes' list of the 400 richest Americans. Since then, Apple's shares have rocketed to a new all-time high, closing Wednesday at $204.92.

So Jobs was a lot richer Wednesday than he was in September — $300 million richer, at least on paper — but only 3/5 that increase is thanks to Apple (AAPL). The rest is Disney's (DIS) doing.

[Jobs was even richer before the market gave up most of its gains in the last hour of trading. See below.]

According to the two companies' proxy statements, the bulk of Jobs' net worth is in the form of preferentially owned stock:

• 5.426 million shares of Apple (most of it from a 2003 grant of 10 million shares, later reduced to pay taxes)
• 138 million shares of Disney (from when Disney acquired Pixar)

In the six weeks since Forbes took its financial snapshot, Apple has gained 32.42 points (as of Wednesday's close) while Disney inched up 87 cents. But because Jobs' net worth is so much more closely tied to Disney than to Apple, those 87 cents carry a lot of weight in his portfolio. Bottom line: by Wednesday night, Jobs' holdings had increased in value …

• from Apple:   $180 milion
• from Disney: $120 million
• total:              $300 million

Shortly after 2 p.m., before the market tanked, Apple was up 9.71 points to an all-time intraday high of 208.62, and Disney was up .36 points to $29.71, together adding $103.5 million to Jobs' bottom line.

Apple closed the day at $204.92, up 6.16 points. Disney closed at $29.23, down 12 cents.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Roundtable brings together top tech executives

Before there is Brainstorm Tech (the conference) there is Infotech Forty (the forum).

Fortune senior writer Jon Fortt and I are co-chairing an intimate event for a group of high-ranking technology executives whose jobs are becoming increasingly strategic in their corporations. No longer are these chief information officers and chief technology officers the folks who make company computers and software run; they play key roles in making sure their enterprises meet financial and other goals.

Attendees include Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior, SAP tech chief Vishal Sikka, and Albert Cheng, executive vice president, digital media for Disney's ABC group.

The conversation is sure to be lively as these senior tech execs debate and discuss issues such as cloud computing and the role of social networks in the corporation. (For a sneak preview of the issues around cloud computing that will shape the conversation, check out Fortune's recent profile of software-as-a-service pioneer Salesforce.com, Fortt's story on how truck maker Kenworth gets access to supercomputers via the 'Net, and this piece on why client/server software isn't going away anytime soon.)

It's no accident that Eve, Wall-E's sleek, pod-like love interest in the forthcoming Disney/Pixar animated feature film by the same name, looks like something out of Apple's (AAPL) design department.

Writing in the current issue of Fortune, Richard Siklos reports that Jonathan Ive, head of Apple's design department and the man responsible for the iMac, iPod and iPhone, had a hand in creating the robot.

In the piece, director Andrew Stanton tells Siklos:

"I wanted Eve to be high-end technology — no expense spared — and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous. The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design." (link)

According to Siklos, a call from Stanton to Steve Jobs in 2005 resulted in Ive spending a day at Pixar consulting on the Eve prototype. Siklos writes:

"Stanton said that it was a 'lovefest' with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. 'Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn't even really allude to where the future of technology was going,' says Stanton. 'The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do.' (Through a spokesman, Ive declined to comment.)" (link)

Disney (DIS) bought Pixar in 2006 in a deal that made Jobs Disney's largest individual shareholder.

Stanton, who directed Finding Nemo, says he's been kicking around the idea for Wall-E for years, even before Toy Story was made. He has summarized it most succinctly like this: "What if mankind evacuated Earth and forgot to turn off the last remaining robot?"

The movie opens June 27, which is the day the smart money is betting that the 3G iPhone goes on sale.

You can read Siklos' piece at Fortune.com here.

It may come as some consolation to the investors who lost their shirts as Apple (AAPL) shares collapsed over the past month that nobody lost more, at least on paper, than its CEO.

As the company's largest individual stockholder, with 5,546,451 shares directly owned, Steve Jobs (were he paying attention) could have watched the value of his holdings drop from $1.126 billion just before Christmas to $771 million at Wednesday's close, a paper loss of $354 million.

Over at Walt Disney Co. (DIS), where Jobs is also the single largest stockholder, the news is even more grim. The value of the 138 million Disney shares he owns (thanks to the sale of Pixar two years ago) fell from a pre-Christmas high of $4.588 billion to $3.935 billion yesterday, a loss of $652 million.

That's a total hit of just over $1 billion in the space of a month.

Of course, these are just paper losses. Like any shareholder, Jobs doesn't actually lose a penny unless he sells his stock at the lower price. But given the fact that his annual salary is once again a symbolic $1, this might not be a bad time for Apple's board to start looking for another way to compensate its hard-working CEO. At least that's how Fake Steve Jobs sees it:

I just called Peter Oppenheimer and told him to get into position with the options machine and be ready to begin firing on my order. We're going to wait and see how bad things get today. I think this might be a golden opportunity for a handful of top insiders to make some quick money. Ideally we'd like to see the stock get down below $100. Keep your fingers crossed! Daddy needs a bigger jet. (link)