NBC Universal (NYSE: GE) Chief Digital Officer George Kliavkoff discussed some of the features of Hulu.com, the company’s video JV with News Corp. (NYSE: NWS), in an interview with former CBS (NYSE: CBS) News president Andrew Heyward at OMMA’s Advertising Week ‘07:

—Reskinning Hulu player so that it meshes with its distribution partners, such as MSN and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO). “The benefits of coming to the Hulu site (is that it) has higher quality video and the ability to take a piece of content with you that you can’t get from the distribution partner sites. But we have struck a good balance, from an ad sales perspective, of getting consumers to view our videos on the site as well as through our distribution partners.”

—Content partners have a right to buy back their video programming to sell ads on their sites.

—We still have a contract with Apple (NSDQ: AAPL). We were required to send a notice that we didn’t want to renew, but at the end of the day, we’re happy to sell through any company that allows us wholesale price flexibility and piracy protection. One of the things we were able to do with every one of our content partners was filtering and piracy protection. They have a financial incentive, because we pay them when they air the authorized version, as opposed to a pirated version of our content.

—Heyward pointed to a Sanford Bernstein study that noted that short clips tends to work better than long form. “I disagree with that premise. People are sitting through full episodes and they’re retaining the advertising with those shows. 83 percent of the people who start watching an episode watch it to its conclusion. It’s only since last year that we’ve been doing this. All the networks found that it drives incremental viewing. It’s being used as a DVR, to catch up on episodes they’ve missed… So it’s unlikely to cannibalize our first run shows. Whether it will hurt TV viewing will do our syndication business, is something we won’t know for another four our five years.”

— The revenue distribution model for mobile phones is broken. “The carriers take 70 percent and content aggregators take 21 percent. That leaves 9 percent to content owners. Compare that to other markets, it doesn’t create enough incentives to create original content. That said, mobile content still our biggest single opportunity. People will buy a song for 99 cents online, but for a 10-second ringtone, they’ll pay $3. That tells you a lot about how content on that medium is valued.”

—The promise of IPTV is instant channel change, unlimited channel capacity and is highly personal. “It’s the early days and revenue isn’t there from subscribers yet. We have to embrace the way we approach these new platforms.”