After months of speculation, a new video-sharing joint venture from NBC and News Corp. has finally emerged. It's called Hulu, and it's a portal of sorts that contains clips and full episodes of TV shows such as Heroes and The Bionic Woman -- they can be watched online from the site, or the clips can be easily embedded in webpages and MySpace sites. Although it hasn't actually launched yet (that comes in a couple of months), some of the content from Hulu has already shown up on the AOL website.

I would give you the URL, but there wouldn't be much point, or at least not for non-U.S. readers. That's because if you have the misfortune to be living outside the continental United States, the Hulu content will be unavailable to you. You will see the page with clickable video clips, but when you click on one it will say "this content is unavailable in your region" or something to that effect. Like many other U.S. sites, Hulu is using IP blocking, which bars any non-U.S. Internet address from accessing its content.

I wrote about this phenomenon recently with respect to The Daily Show, after Viacom's Comedy Central put up a site with thousands of clips and previous episodes of the show. Canadians got the same message from that site -- or at least they did for a few hours, after which any Canadian traffic was automatically redirected to the (Canadian) Comedy Network site (while you can watch some recent episodes of The Daily Show there, however, you don't get anything like the 16,000 clips that are available at the Comedy Central site).

The arrival of Hulu is likely to amplify the frustration that many Canadian Web surfers feel when they run into the Great Wall of U.S. Media. So you missed that last episode of My Name Is Earl? If you're in the U.S., you can go to the NBC site and watch it streaming, or you can even download it from iTunes. If you are in Canada, however, you have to find someone who recorded it, or you have to download it illegally (although the technically savvy can also make use of what are called "anonymous proxies", which disguise your IP address).

The ironic thing, of course, is that the vast majority of Canadian TV programming is made up of U.S. content. Having developed a taste for Chuck or Family Guy or some other show, you can't watch it from the website of the network that originally created it. Or at least most of the time you can't. In some cases -- including Heroes -- you can watch streaming episodes from a website (in the case of Heroes it's Global TV's site), but then other shows such as My Name Is Earl are unavailable.

This phenomenon is a function of the licensing deals that Canadian networks have struck with the U.S. networks they get their content from, and also a function of the way the Canadian TV industry is structured and regulated by the CRTC. When all of that collides with the free-for-all nature of the Internet, however, the reality is that Canadian viewers can wind up feeling like a kid in a candy store: They can see all the wonderful things that are on display, but they can't have any of them.