I was rather chuffed to find confirmation that I had made it into the Hulu private beta in my (email) inbox yesterday morning. If the words “Hulu private beta” doesn’t make any sense to you, well I guess that makes you…most people.

Hulu is a new venture from both NBC-Universal and News Corp. (aka Fox), meant to beat YouTube at its own game by putting their own clips (and full episodes) online, instead of waiting for someone else to do it. It’s the reason NBC and Fox have been more vigilant about pulling clips of their material from YouTube lately (even stuff they put up there themselves, all of the “SNL” digital shorts posted by NBC have sadly vanished. Office places the nation wide wept once it was no longer easy to forward Natalie Portman rapping. Oh man, she’s totally saying things you wouldn’t normally expect Natalie Portman to say!).

After one day of playing around with it, it is pretty cool. Putting whole episodes online is nothing new but it’s nice to have it in a tidy embedded Flash player instead of a slow-loading pop-up thingamajig. And since it’s NBC and Fox, it’s all the sister channels; your USA, Sci Fi, Bravo, and even digital cable oddities like Fuel TV (it DOES exist!). And since it’s a corporate entity, expect lots of ads (after just a little bit of perusal, I had an irresistible desire to switch to Esurance. Blame that spunky Erin Esurance!). There are a few new tricks added (like the “dim lights” feature), but really all that matters in this instance is content. Somehow my DVR missed the last episode of “House,” but there it was. So was, every episode of “Arrested Development,” tons of “Saturday Night Live” material old and new, and even some classic “Battlestar Galactica.” There’s tons more - even plans to put movies up there.

Apparently, Hulu will eventually be opened up to user-submitted videos, which seems pretty pointless to me, given the glut of sites that are already doing that successfully (YouTube, Metacafe, Break, DailyMotion). And as far as I can tell, the only reason any of them are able to compete with YouTube is because they’re more likely to allow um, more “mature” content. Hulu already seems to have the silver-bullet that YouTube can’t offer - higher-quality, copyrighted content - so why try to beat them at its own game?

I have no idea when it’ll be opened to the public, but if you’re curious, you can sign up for the beta at their site, though it took a few weeks from when I signed up to when I gained access. I think they’re just doing it in order of requests, so be patient - trust me, when I said up there that I “made it into” the beta, it really was due to no merit or effort on my part.