In the earliest days of Hulu, or at least the earliest I knew about it, either in 2008 or 2009 I think, Hulu was nothing but an aggregate site to watch network TV shows on demand. You could watch NBC, FOX, ABC, etc. shows with commercials from your laptop and without DVR'ing it first. No original content at all. The draw was two-fold. One, it was a hub for network shows and you could quit navigating to abc.com first to catch up on Modern Family, then to fotwitter.com to catch up on The Simpsons, etc. Two, for whatever reason, its video player was more reliable than the networks' native websites for their own shows. If I wanted to catch up on Lost, half the time abc.com's crap website couldn't render the video. The networks had known issues relating to that. hulu.com was a cleaner, more reliable experience.
I want to say there was one broadcast network whose shows were not available on Hulu. If there was, I don't remember which one.
