Comments on: hulu goes public

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 23:58:01 +0000

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…

By: hitsuji

hitsuji — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:46:48 +0000

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

By: SMASH

SMASH — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:21:12 +0000

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.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 20:42:17 +0000

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.

By: Exer

Exer — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:43:29 +0000

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.

By: Exer

Exer — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:38:42 +0000

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.

By: Evan

Evan — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:08:40 +0000

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.

By: chad

chad — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:52:21 +0000

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.

By: Hitsuji

Hitsuji — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:45:28 +0000

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.