Yesterday Hulu announced Hulu Labs - "a place to try out experimental projects from Hulu and share your feedback while they're still in development." Four current projects are listed, "Hulu Desktop," "Video Panel Designer," "Recommendations" and "Time-Based Browsing."

Hulu Desktop, a browser-less app for surfing videos with a Windows Media Center or Apple remote controls moves Hulu yet another step closer to the proverbial "10 foot" or TV-like experience. Yet as Peter Kafka at AllThingsD rightly notes, Hulu continues to draw a seemingly arbitrary distinction between screens. It's fine with the Hulu folks to use Desktop to watch on a large monitor connected to your computer. But if you want to watch on an actual TV (via Boxeee, for example) that's a no-no.

So even as Hulu admiringly pushes the bounds to improve its users' experiences, it is going to continue to find itself in wrapped around the axle trying to explain itself. What would change all this and make Hulu's owners agnostic to whether you watch Hulu's programs on PCs or TVs? Simple: Hulu demonstrating it can generate ad revenue at parity (or better) with traditional on-air delivery. Once it can do that, then these distinctions will melt away. Problem is, despite Jeff Zucker asserting that Hulu is ahead of plan, the reality is that Hulu is nowhere close to achieving parity (nor has it shared a roadmap for doing so).

Until this happens, things like Hulu Desktop are neat, but will only cause more head-scratching among Hulu's tech-savvy early-adopter audiences.

What do you think? Post a comment now.