The News Corp. (NWS)-NBC Universal online video joint venture finally has a name! Hulu.

Say wha? Hulu? Won’t that confuse people since it sounds like Sulu of “Star Trek” fame? George Takei rocks! It also sounds a lot like Lulu, a custom online book publisher I’ve written about. And to be completely infantile, if the site has any major problems, it’s going to be very easy for people like to me to start writing about how Hulu is in deep doodoo.

But according to a message on Hulu from the site’s CEO Jason Kilar, a former Amazon.com (AMZN) executive who joined the site in June, News Corp. and NBC decided to go with Hulu because it “is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building. Our hope is that Hulu will embody our (admittedly ambitious) never-ending mission, which is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premier content when, where and how you want it.”

The two media companies announced their online video distribution partnership in March and since then, they had been referring to the site simply as NewSite. But that didn’t stop people from wondering what the site would eventually be called. Some, including me, jokingly referred to it as MeTooTube since News Corp. and the GE (GE) owned NBC Universal appeared to be trying to take on Google’s (GOOG) insanely popular YouTube.

Hulu may seem like an odd choice for a moniker since it has nothing to do with either News Corp.’s Fox brand or the NBC name and is more than a tad wacky. Then again, the companies might be hoping that people don’t treat the site as an example of “old media”companies playing catch-up in the world of online video.

And to be fair, Hulu is not really the YouTube killer that many in the media are making it out to be. The site is focusing more on the professional content from the vast libraries of News Corp. and NBC and not user-generated videos. Hulu is also just going to be one part of the broader distribution partnership as News Corp. and NBC are also syndicating content to sites such as AOL, which is owned by my parent company Time Warner (TWX), Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft’s (MSFT) MSN.

If you are interested in checking more out about Hulu, the site is now accepting invitations to sign up for the site’s beta, which will launch in October.

So what do you think of Hulu? Do you like the name? Have anything better? More importantly, will you actually use the site or do you plan on sticking with places like YouTube and other popular online video destinations like Metacafe, Dailymotion and Yahoo! Video?