Cancel your subscription to the Radio Times. Hulu, the most popular television website in the world, is to start streaming shows to British internet users in September. In contrast to video-on-demand services from British broadcasters, such as the BBC’s iPlayer and Channel 4’s 4oD, which restrict themselves to the output of their parent corporations, Hulu will offer shows from many sources, including Channel 4, ITV and possibly even the BBC. All will be free and legal to view whenever you want, and all found in one place.

Hulu counts among its owners Disney, NBC Universal and News Corporation (the parent company of The Sunday Times), and is already a hit in the US, serving up 400m videos to 10m Americans every month.

Those viewers can choose from current and past episodes of more than 1,250 primetime shows, including The Simpsons, Heroes and 30 Rock, with the latest episodes available immediately after broadcast. Not all of those titles will cross to this side of the Atlantic, but it is expected the site will make available to UK internet users 3,000 hours of American programming alongside its British material, once the problem of international rights has been sorted out.

Unlike the BBC’s popular iPlayer service, which requires the user to download software to watch video at the highest quality, all shows on Hulu can be streamed inside the window of an internet browser, using programs already installed on most computers.

The image quality will depend on the speed of your internet connection, with an increasing number of programmes available in high definition. The site also offers a feature it describes as an online DVR (digital video recorder), which users can set up to keep links to favourite programmes and entire series, much like a Freeview recorder or Sky+ set-top box.

Advertisements, however, will be inescapable, because video-on-demand viewers will not be able to fast-forward through them, even if using the online DVR. There will be at least one set of ads to sit through at the beginning of each stream, with possible further breaks in longer shows — although, it is claimed, fewer in total than the amount allowed on commercial British television (the BBC’s iPlayer is funded through the TV licence fee and does not show ads).

Shows from Hulu cannot be downloaded as digital files to be played back on another device, which means they can be viewed only on a computer. However, video-on-demand capability will soon be built directly into TV sets. Last week, ARM, the British microchip manufacturer whose products are at the heart of most of the world’s smartphones, announced a deal with LG Electronics to build powerful computer and graphics chips designed to be embedded in the South Korean company’s TV sets.

Together, video-on-demand services such as Hulu, and the latest generation of TV sets from LG, which will doubtless be copied by rival manufacturers, have the potential to give the biggest shake-up to the British TV industry since the cable and satellite explosion of the 1990s. Provided viewers have broadband in the home, they will be able to surf the web and select video without even the need for a computer.

Given a broadband connection of 10Mb a second — already a reality in parts of the UK — the ARM chip-set is powerful enough to stream and display even 1080p full-HD video. Jim Wallace, a senior executive at ARM, predicted that the first of the new sets would be on sale by 2011. “The ability to watch what you want, when you want, is going to be key to the future of television viewing,” he said.

Because these sets essentially will be computers, viewers could potentially download features such as player statistics from websites when watching sport or run a ticker-tape showing the weather forecast and news headlines. The concept of scrapping aerials, satellite dishes and set-top boxes as broadcasters reinvent themselves as internet companies streaming video on demand directly to hybrid TV/computers, might seem like a long way off, but the British TV industry has realised that the likes of Hulu are the future.

Virgin, for example, already offers some video on demand to its cable set-top box. But Project Canvas, an internet video catch-up service funded by the BBC, ITV and BT, will not launch for at least a year, and by then Hulu might already have captured a big chunk of the market.

How it works: Hulu, the world’s biggest TV site, at a glance

Launched: March 2007

Availability: US only at present, with a commitment to launch worldwide “as quickly as possible”. UK debut expected in September

Line-up: Shows from 1,250 TV series made by nearly 150 broadcasters

Video quality Depends on connection speed. Ranges from a medium-size window in your browser to broadcast TV quality. Selected shows available in 720p HD

Minimum requirements: A 480Kb/sec broadband connection on a Windows PC, Mac or Linux computer, running IE 6, Firefox 1.5 or Safari 2.0 and Adobe Flash Player 9

Explore Personal Tech

• InGear