Hackers hula over Hulu

Just a couple of days after Hulu's launch in private beta, the joint endeavor between NBCU and News Corp. has already been compromised.

Worse still, some are accessing the content ad-free.

Hulu provides free viewing of films, television shows and clips to users along with pre-roll and other ad formats, copiously selected to please both advertisers and viewers.

But on Thursday, registrants at Premity.com — a software-vending site for online coupons — were able to watch clips of NBC and Fox shows, ad-free.

These aren't direct rips of complete shows, and owner Jeremy Oswald of Premity sees no threat to Hulu. "It's just something we were playing around with. It's an interface that my business partner built to be able to watch the different clips and show them randomly."

The Street perceives Hulu's launch as a response to worries that Fox and NBC-owned content could appear on YouTube without control and without appropriate proprietary credit.

But perhaps the private beta launch only invited those inclined to exacerbate the problem.

The seed of larger worries lie in how easily the "unskippable," unembeddable ads can be removed from Hulu's content.