Hulu, the online video joint venture of NBC, Fox and Disney that’s funded by Providence Equity Partners, seems to be having familial issues. No, it’s not YouTube or TV Everywhere giving the second-most popular online video service in the U.S. headaches. Instead, internal bickering is causing problems, MediaWeek reports. This is not the first time Hulu’s parents have undermined the service. But it comes as a surprise — traditional media companies have a long history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Network officials are complaining about Hulu’s sales staff selling against the network’s own sales teams, according to MediaWeek:

“It’s confusing and conflicting, and very muddled,” said Lisa Herdman, vp, director of national programming for RPA, who handles Honda’s online media. Most stop short of accusing Hulu of outright deception but report that its sellers are often not forthcoming about what they can and cannot sell…On the flip side, buyers say that broadcast networks are inconsistent when it comes to selling Hulu avails. “There are a lot of growing pains with the whole scenario,” said Jeff Ratner, digital director, North America, Mindshare Interaction/Maxus. “Hulu has created a legitimate marketplace for online video. Now you are seeing the downside.”

Hulu has succeeded beyond everyone’s expectations, including those of the networks, which three years ago panicked over the rise of YouTube (and Google.) Despite being a big critic of the joint venture — such ventures almost never work out — I eventually changed my mind and ate crow: Hulu is brilliant. In September, 583 million videos were watched on Hulu, making it the second-largest video destination behind YouTube.

The simplicity of its interface and ease of use have made it the darling of American TV fans. If YouTube became an obvious destination to watch video shorts online, Hulu set a standard for the quality of professionally produced video streams. Even Quincy Smith, outgoing CEO of CBS Interactive, who has in the past questioned Hulu’s business model, admits the “service is freakin’ bad-ass and [Hulu CEO] Jason [Kilar] is an extremely great product guy, GM and a guy who can sell.”

Agreed! Kilar has done a good job of delivering a killer product, despite the competing egos and agendas at various networks. But I wonder if Kilar can really keep this whole thing going. Smith, his bombastic views on Hulu aside, is not wrong in his skepticism of the joint venture. During his on-stage conversation with me at our third NewTeeVee Live conference last week, Smith said, “Hulu got extremely successful extremely early, and that might ultimately hurt them.”

“Before you go putting [your content online] in full episodes, you gotta take it to the audience and make sure they know that it’s on this screen,” he said, referring to the need to encourage viewers to watch broadcast television.

Hulu’s owners are pushing the service around “by imposing delayed windows on certain content and allowing just a limited number of episodes available at any given time” — or charging subscription fees. These are Band-Aids. (Related content from GigaOM Pro: “Hulu and the end of Free TV”)

The networks are fighting a losing battle. Why? Because Hulu is only a signpost of things to come. Like YouTube, Hulu is showing the media buyers that there is a smarter, targeted and metric-based approach to buying media on behalf of customers. This is a long-term cyclical shift, and the TV networks will continue to bleed, Hulu or not.

TV advertising has (and continues to be) successful for mass marketing efforts, but even the idea of mass market is going through a big shift. The TV audiences will continue to get divided and subdivided into various niches. Furthermore, the rise of “TV Everywhere,” a way for you to watch cable company-provided video content on the web, is going to eat into the mass market. If the mass market continues to shrivel, then networks will be fighting to get a piece of the shrinking pie. It is no surprise then that the media companies are bickering with their own spawn.

(Related Research: The Ultimate Guide to TV Everywhere, subscription required. Sign up for GigaOM Pro for $79 a year subscription which gives you access for unlimited research.)

One of the more memorable Monty Python bits is the “Bring out your dead!” segment from The Holy Grail. The poor subject of the joke pleading “I’m not dead yet!” is a fitting metaphor for the network TV world, which breathed a collective sigh of relief last week as new shows premiered with generally good numbers.

The concept of live network TV seems increasingly outdated as DVRs, iTunes and Hulu become more mainstream, allowing viewers to watch what they want, when they want. The industry itself even poked fun at its diminishing power during last week’s Emmy program.

But the networks got a bit of a reprieve as season premieres garnered respectable audiences. CBS was up 7 percent through the first four nights of the new season, with an average of 14.2 million viewers, writes The LA Times; and FOX was up 35 percent to 9.4 million, thanks to a big bow for House.

The networks need that upward trend to continue after last year’s season, which, writes the Times, was the least-watched in the history of the five broadcast networks. Those low ratings hit the bottom line, too, as negotiations for the upfront ad buys slogged through the summer and prices were down 22 percent compared to last year.

But it’s not quite salad days for the networks just yet. Last week’s numbers weren’t great across the board. Freshman show Community lost 26 percent of its audience its second week, CSI was off by 44 percent year-over-year and Dancing with the Stars was down 25 percent from last fall and 33 percent from this past spring.

More important, however, is the fact that premiere week is a bit anomalous. Two-hour season openers jumble the true competitive landscape, and viewing historically tends to inflate 10 percent vs. the rest of the season.

Over the past year, YouTube has made a concerted effort to embrace premium content like TV shows to attract ad revenue. But according to a new report from Screen Digest analyst Arash Amel, the video-sharing giant faces an uphill battle as the Hollywood networks and studios gobble up most of the market for ad-supported TV programming online.

In his report “US Networks claim half of free online TV market,” Amel says that the broadcasting and cable business in the U.S. will shed $2 billion in ad revenue by 2013, dropping to $67 billion from $69 billion in 2008. While TV ad dollars go down, there will be an increase in ad revenue generated by TV programming on the web. Amel says that ad-supported, web-based TV programming generated $448 million in revenues in 2008, and the total ad revenues from online entertainment programming, sports, news and events will be more than $1.45 billion by 2013.

While online ad revenues will grow, they will only account for 2.2 percent of TV ad revenues by 2013, according to Amel. The bummer news for networks is that increase in web revenues won’t cover the $2 billion in overall ad losses. The good news for networks, though, is that they’re doing a good job of keeping Google/YouTube at bay when it comes to premium content.

Amel writes that combined, the network web sites (ABC.com, NBC.com, etc.) and Hulu accounted for 53 percent of the ad-supported online TV market in 2008 (the remainder going to “online video services of major sports leagues, video services from traditional online portals, and direct services from other major channel groups and content owners”). Further, Hollywood’s dominance should perpetuate itself. From the Screen Digest press release:

In contrast, third party platforms such as YouTube, Joost and other portals, which have no direct vertical affiliation with major rights holders, nor direct access to premium content rights, will struggle to aggregate ad-supported movies and TV shows. The Hollywood Studios and major rights holders will continue to limit such deals, instead preferring to build their own syndicated ad-supported online video services – such as Crackle, developed by Sony Pictures, and the CBS Audience Network. This is a trend that will gather momentum. As a result, third party ad-supported video platforms may have to either diversify into new forms of their own original programming, exit the content aggregation business and offer technology and advertising solutions to the content-owners’ and broadcasters’ own services, or settle on the low-margin business of becoming affiliates of the player-platforms distributed by the content rights holders themselves.

Screen Digest’s comments come after recent numbers from TubeMogul that found full-length TV shows are not that popular on YouTube, averaging just 7,407.9 views per episode.

Funny Amel should mention original programming as a survival strategy for the likes of YouTube. Over the weekend we wondered what the role of original web series was anymore as so much emphasis is placed in creating web extensions of offline brands.

We’ve got a ton of TV-related Twitter action this week, and surprise, surprise, Trendrr says the Super Bowl (or “superbowl” for the character-limit conscious) reigned supreme, with everyone tweeting about the exciting game.

Unfortunately, all those bummed Arizona fans threw off Trendrr’s charts a little as their Tweets about how the Cardinals “lost” made it look like people were buzzing about the show Lost at the end of last week. Such are the dangers of tracking commonly named shows.

Elsewhere, the recent Heroes reboot translated into its own super-sized bump above the competition.

Vikings are the name of the game over at TorrentFreak’s Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent list, as James Caviezel leads a band of Norsemen against an alien invasion in Outlander. And perhaps as the final farewell, pirates bid adieu to George Bush by BitTorrenting the film W.

NOTE: TorrentFreak data is based on http downloads of .torrent files from various BitTorrent sites. The data is collected by TorrentFreak and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently both DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted. The “back” designation means that the title was in the list before and has reappeared, possibly in a new format.

Nielsen released September viewers stats for web sites of the four major broadcast networks last week, revealing that the number of unique viewers went up across the board. But, in an odd turn of statistics, only Fox, which had the fewest unique visitors, was able to increase the amount of time per viewer on its site. In fact, time spent on Fox nearly doubled, while other sites fell off a cliff.

According to Nielsen, the new fall season and the tail end of the presidential campaign helped drive up the number of people logging on to the networks as they caught up on missed TV. NBC in particular got a more than 300 percent bump, which can be explained in part by one woman: Tina Fey-lin. The SNL star’s Palin impersonation was viral video gold.

But, while almost all the networks saw triple percentage growth in uniques from August to September (poor, CBS with its measly double-digits), only Fox saw an increase in time spent. CBS and NBC actually saw the time viewers spent on their sites just about cut in half. That’s bad news, because less time spent means fewer ads seen.

The Olympics could account for NBC’s precipitous drop from 68.5 minutes August to just 34.6 minutes in September. Visitors were no longer constantly coming back to check event results. We’re not sure why CBS saw the smallest gain in uniques, while simultaneously seeing the time spent per those visitors slump from 91.7 minutes in August to 48.4 minutes per viewer in September. Perhaps people are watching CBS shows on partner sites rather than the network site itself. But ABC, which keeps its programming locked up pretty tight, also had the amount of time spent on its site dip slightly from 47 minutes to 45 minutes.

Outside statistics like these are always tricky. I contacted Nielsen and they didn’t have any insight to account for the drastic differences among networks, and a Fox representative told us that it did nothing special to its site during that time; the only thing the network changed was the shows available on the site.