I received my “private beta invitation” from hulu.com a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been thoroughly impressed from day one. It has a great selection of shows, a near-perfect user interface, and fast, high-quality video.
For those not familiar with Hulu, it started out as a joint venture between NBC and Fox to showcase their primetime shows and has grown beyond that.
Here’s what I like about Hulu:
- Great show selection.
- Simple, easy-to-use, uncluttered user interafce
- Automatically resume playing a show right where you left off (even recovers from browser crashes)
- Full-screen viewing option
- Descent video quality: you will notice macro-blocking and the lower frame rate in full screen mode, but it is by no means distracting, especially if you scoot back from your screen an extra foot or two
- HD Video: this will eliminate all quality complaints, but it’s only available for a few movie trailers at this point
- Commercials: there is one 30 second commercial every 15 minutes. Not bad. And all of the commercials are for the same company, so you kinda know what to expect when it is commercial time, which makes them almost enjoyable. Yes, you read that correctly, I was actually enjoying that Toyota commercial by the end of the show.
You can catch episodes of Firefly, Heroes, The Office, Scrubs, Chuck, 30 Rock, House, Battlestar Galactica (new and classic), Rosewell, Arrested Development, Journeyman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mary Tyler Moore, and many, many more.
Conclusion
It’s great entertainment when you need a break (such as from visiting your family over the holidays.) Sign-up for an invitation now; it took me about a week to receive mine. In the meantime, you can view shows on openhulu.com.
Just Playing Around
And finally, one of the coolest features is that you can embed your favorite shows into your own website. Instead of simply posting about how great a show is, show an episode. Here are some of my favorites:
Firefly: Perhaps one of the best science fiction TV shows ever shown on network TV. You can watch the entire series online; here is the first episode:
Roswell: I’d never watched a single episode but noticed its high rating on Hulu. I watched the pilot and decided that I missed out on a great series. This is definitely something I’ll be watching via hulu. Here is the pilot:
Journeyman: NBC has apparently canceled this show (yet decided to keep the unwatchable Bionic Woman remake alive.) I think people found Journeyman too difficult to follow, especially if they missed an episode. Out of all current shows on TV, I thought it has/had the best theme song and background music. Maybe watching it online will cause a revival. Here’s a clip from Episode 8:
Hi,
It really is a nice service, unfortunatelly it is only available at the US. This reminds me, how do you watch your favorite shows when you are travelling outside US?
Regards, and a Happy New Year.
—
Jorge
When traveling without Internet access, I generally plan ahead and download shows from my TiVo to my laptop, or I convert a DVD that I own to a small mpeg4 file that I can play on my phone (Palm Treo 650 and TCPMP for playback.) If you do have Internet access, you can connect a Sling Box at home (or someone else’s home) and stream TV that way.
actually, that is not true. i run contextual ads on my site and that means that very often the ads shown are for their products.
secondly, i know of several cases where people have bought the titles they watched on my site from other sources.
this is the old argument about whether or not file sharing helps sales or not… and sales data shows that it DOES help sales of the actual product.
and finally, my site doesn’t host the movies in question, the sites that actually host them allow for embedding in a similar way that YouTube uses.
you are entitled to your opinion, even if it is not factual.
i appreciate your discussing this with me rather than just deleting my comment.
the majority of the movie and TV sites seem to be outside of the US… so, when you are outside of the US there are alternate sources for the same shows.
personally, i think the US sites are seriously missing out by limiting who can watch their shows… to me, it would seem a great way to reach viewers that normally wouldnt stand a chance at watching the shows.
check my site and you can watch Firefly from outside the US.
those Blu-Ray practices actually violate fair use. they can’t do whatever they want 😉 they can for now because they havent been taken to court over it… but that is a whole separate debate and i am sure if you wanted to have such a debate on your site you would make an article about it rather than just have it in the depths of your comments… the reason i bring it up is because there is a lot of misunderstanding about what is legal and what isn’t legal on both sides of the issue… don’t just take their word for things or even take my word for things but actually look into the law itself… things are not exactly as they appear.
anyway, i just thought my site was on topic and served a need brought up in your comments… i appreciate this discussion though and should you want to debate this further and maybe turn it into an article for your site you know my email address… thank you for providing good web where differences of opinion can be rationally discussed and allow others to see the words and ideas.
and on a side note… i noticed you have managed to dive St Thomas… you were so close yet so far… if you ever make it back to the Virgin Islands, DO check out Buck Island off St Croix!!
Too bad the people who actually produced the content don’t get a single penny from your site. They produced it, they own it, and they get to decide who watches it and how. Showing ads on your site and making money while not paying the content owners anything for their work is not cool, at least in my opinion.
To be honest, I wasn’t sure if your comment was genuine or just one providing a link to a website. I’m glad that you’ve responded back!
I agree with you that the media companies should be offering content online and driving sales of their hard media or paid downloads. They should also be targeting international markets. Unfortunately, they seem to be stuck in the past century. I also think they should be offering managed copy on Blu-Ray (and DVD) so that people who purchase the media can distribute it to all of their devices.
Unfortunately, they own the content and can do with it whatever they want. And prevent us from doing with it what we want. I really hope this opens a big door for companies who are more willing to delight their customers rather than worry about protecting their business model. Unfortunately, their content is great and there is no real competition, except for pirated copies. I try to stay on the legitimate side of the line and purchase all of the media I own. But I do think it’s great that piracy is at least putting pressure on big media to be more consumer-focused.