hulu goes public
Hulu, the online video service offering videos from more than 50 content providers, including FOX, NBC and others launches today. After being in beta for 18 weeks, the site is now open to all. The downside is that you can only view the shows if you’re within the US, unless of course you discovered some sort of way around it. A circumvention if you will. I’ve been playing around with the site and have to say I am pleased. Watching full episodes of The Office, The Simpsons and Family guy is nice, knowing it shouldn’t be pulled down and the video quality is decent as well. Thoughts?
9 Comments, Comment or Trackback
Hitsuji
Just had a play around with it myself, the service seems to be pretty good, but the video quality seems to me poor and very grainy. But still quite an excellent service none the less.
Mar 12th, 2008
chad
if you get the Veoh.com “Veohtv” application it ties into this nicely, I highly recommend it… it’s like Joost, but without all the lame ass content.
Mar 12th, 2008
Evan
Hitsuji - Well what are you comparing the videos from Hulu to? Compared to YouTube they’re great. Compared to actually being on TV, not so much. Of course it depends on what you’re looking at. Newer shows like The Office will obviously look better than something like Welcome Back Kotter.
Mar 12th, 2008
Exer
I’ve been using this for the past few months off and on, but to be honest the only thing I’ve really watched is Firefly. Overall I was quite happy with the service and features, especially how it remembers that “last viewed” state of the show I had been watching before closing my browser. There had been quite a few times I had to leave in the middle of watching an episode, and it was convenient not needing to remember the exact moment I had left off.
It was also nice that I could embed the episodes on my blog, for those friends of mine who wanted to watch, yet didn’t want to sign up for the beta. I found the quality to be more than sufficient for online viewing. It’s not like I plan to burn any of the content to a DVD and watch on my plasma tv.
Mar 12th, 2008
Exer
Oh I forgot to mention the commercials. Yes, the episodes had commercials, but they weren’t all that distracting. On the contrary, Hulu seemed to have tried to sync the online commercials to coincide with when the commercials would have aired during a live TV broadcast as well.
It might be a little more distracting to see commercials in a full-length movie though.
Mar 12th, 2008
Kevin
I’ve used this service for the last several months at work on my lunch break. I’ve watched all of Firefly, and I am currently working my way through Roswell.
Quality? Good enough for my lunch break. Commercials? Didn’t play consistently in Beta. I would often watch a whole episode without seeing a commercial.
But I will say that when an advertisement does come on you do notice it. And I think that makes it good for advertisers. I can tell you hulu’s top three advertisers right now after using the service for three omnths or so. So if they ever come up with a way to test brand recognition after viewing videos on hulu I think they’ll realize they are getting their moneys worth.
Mar 12th, 2008
SMASH
Site is a LOT better then i would expect it to be..
tv shows ads are good but i think the movies have a few to many in it.
Mar 12th, 2008
hitsuji
Evan - I was actually comparing it to BBC’s iPlayer, which, ath the time I tried it, suffered from a much poorer interface but had superior video quality
Mar 13th, 2008
Michael
Yeah, the BBC’s iPlayer is awesome, especially since it is now out of the BETA phase. The Volume of shows, speed of update, lack of any commercial advertising etc. and the ability of it to work over Wifi on my iPhone just makes it awesome.
Tried this (using the workaround) and it seemed to be lacking something. The quality was a bit off and it was slower and offered a much poorer choice…
Mar 14th, 2008
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