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When it comes down to it, the value offered by services like Netflix and Hulu is primarily in their content offerings. Sure, they provide an on-demand, convenient way of consuming that content from a multitude of devices, but at the end of the day, it's all about the television shows and movies available on each service. Historically, the premium videos that stream online have consisted almost entirely of material originally produced for another, older medium. In 2012, that's slowly beginning to change.

After what turned out to be a pretty good year in 2011, Hulu announced last week that they are planning to invest $500 million in new content initiatives. That will undoubtedly include more pricey agreements with traditional content providers, but today the company revealed another place it plans on spending that money: on original programming.

Hulu didn't end up getting sold in 2011, but it nonetheless turned out to be a pretty big year for the premium video streaming service. Overall, the business grew by 60% over the previous year and raked in $420 million in revenue.

That money came from a combination of ad sales and paid subscriptions to the service's Hulu Plus offering. They now have 1.5 million paying subscribers. It's a far cry from Netflix's more than 23 million paying members, but then again Hulu Plus only went live in 2010. According to Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, this is the fastest any paid video streaming service has reached 1.5 million users.

Back in October, I compared the various online streaming services here and Netflix looked like it had the most offerings. But what if you want to search across multiple providers for your streaming content, and find out which one offers you the best deal? Enter CanIStream.It, a free iPhone app from Urban Pixels that allows users to search for movies. It is a great idea whose time has come.

Hulu Plus, the paid subscription offering from the premium video streaming site Hulu, will be available on the Nintendo Wii console and 3DS handheld system by the end of the year, the company announced. Hulu Plus joins Netflix as the second video streaming service available on Nintendo gaming consoles. Both are already available on competing gaming systems like Microsoft's XBox 360 and Sony's Playstation 3.

But the real threat, as Nintendo of America's own president has admitted, is not the traditional gaming console manufacturers. It's Apple.

After months of speculation and rumors, premium online video service Hulu is no longer for sale, the company announced on its blog. Hulu will continue to be owned jointly by News Corporation, the Walt Disney Company, Comcast and Providence Equity Partners for the time being.

The announcement comes after bids from several big tech companies evidently failed to pique the interest of Hulu's current owners. In July, we wrote about why Amazon would make an ideal owner for the service and fold it into its Prime video offerings. Other serious contenders included Yahoo, Dish and Google.

Regular users of premium video streaming site Hulu are by now familiar with the drill: After clicking the play button on a television show or movie, you're given a choice of two or three advertisements to watch. You make your selection and begin watching the latest episode of "Modern Family," which is briefly interrupted only with the ad of your choice.

For something that may seem like a relatively minor detail in the course of one's day, this Ad Swap (formerly Ad Selector) functionality is Hulu's bold, experimental bet on the future of television advertising. The idea is simple: by giving viewers some say in what ads are displayed, you can show them more relevant messages. For advertisers, the value in more effectively targeting ads toward the people most likely be interested in the company's product. Everybody wins.

As Netflix begins the process of spinning out its streaming business from its traditional DVD rentals, I wanted to examine the alternative streaming services that are currently available. I looked at Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus, Vudu.com and Justin.tv. Added to this mix is what is available on Comcast's Xfinity service to just show what can be found from a typical cable TV company. (Of course, if you don't live in a Comcast service area, you can't subscribe to their streaming service online.) I choose five random movies and five TV series to see what was available on each service.

If you thought cable companies were in a panic about the threat the Internet poses to their business model, think again. Rather than sit idly by as Web content makes its way to television screens via set top boxes and smart TVs, companies like Comcast will instead try to position their traditional offerings alongside that streaming content. How? By adding it to set-top boxes.

Specifically, Comcast and Verizon are talking with Microsoft about the possibility of including cable subscriptions via the Xbox 360, according to a report from Digiday. The tech giant's gaming console, which already streams content from sources like Netflix, Hulu Plus and others, could in effect become a cable box if Microsoft manages to strike a deal ahead of its upcoming release of Xbox TV.

Google must really want Hulu. As it fields bids from potential future owners, the premium video content site is reportedly seeing the most generous offer come from Google, reports AllThingsD.

Google joins Yahoo, Amazon and the Dish Network in bidding on the company, but is apparently going above and beyond what those companies are willing to offer. The exact numbers are not known, but Google may well be offering "a couple billion dollars more" than the other bidders, presumably for an acquisition that goes beyond what Hulu was originally offering to sell.

More people are turning to the Internet to watch television shows rather than tuning into the original broadcast, according to a study conducted by Ericsson ConsumerLab. Forty-four percent of respondents said they stream TV shows online more than once per week.

While this is by no means a new development, the trend is continuing unabated as more consumers depend on Web-based, on-demand streaming as their primary means of viewing TV content and broadcast's popularity drops ever-so-slowly.