I finally just got access to hulu.com. For those of you who don’t know, hulu is a joint venture between News Corp. and NBC Universal to bring their content onto the internet. I spend a lot of time watching TV on my laptop so I have used Joost, ABC.com, NBC.com, CBS.com, and The Daily Show. So far my experience with hulu has been much better then any of the others.
For starters the content is obviously superior. With two major networks (WB also rumored to be joining) there are all my favorite shows from The Office, Family Guy, and even when I was bored the other day I watched the pilot to Doogie Howser MD. They also have a select number of older movies like Weekend at Bernie’s. You can create a profile, add videos to your playlist, and even look at your viewing history so I know what episodes I have already seen.
When watching the video in its normal format the picture quality is fantastic. Lots of different options are available to you including: sharing the clip, embedding the clip, getting details on the episode, etc. You can also pop out the video to view in a separate window or make it full screen. However in full screen mode I will say the full screen resolution is not nearly as good as ABC’s. There are usually 3-7 commercial interruptions (depending on length) and whoever the advertiser is they also get a small banner above the video, but when viewing full screen they are not seen at all.
So far I have really enjoyed watching my usual shows on here as well as catching up on some classics. I encourage anyone who hasn’t already to put your name in to try and get a version as well.
St. John Oneil-Dunne
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I’ve been following this lately too and it’s an interesting battlefield:
“3-7 commercial interruptions” vs. a commercial-free, higher quality versions via the torrents – isn’t that really what it comes down to then?
I too got the invitation from hulu yesterday, after, of course much waiting..but it’s a shame that i am not able to watch any of the videos it shows me the message “this video is not available in you country…..”
I LOVE Hulu! I was upset at first when NBC took down all of their clips and videos on Youtube and every other video viewing website, however, once I got access to Hulu… it all made sense. Being a Marketing major, I realized it was a reasonable move on NBC’s part to take down the videos on the other sites as a way to draw some attention to Hulu. The quality is great. I think I prefer it much over NBC.com’s.
I was all set to write a comment about how I don’t like Hulu because of my experience with it last week. When I got an invitation on 11/20, I played with it for about 30 mins. I found it to be excruciatingly slow. Search was broken. Pages didn’t load. The whole experience just sucked.
But in looking at it again today, it’s clear to me that they are improving on it daily. Search is working and the site feels pretty snappy.
My only gripe is that although the resolution of the player is higher than YouTube’s, it’s not as high-res as the full episodes on NBC.com or ABC.com.