I was really happy to find in yesterdays inbox an email from Hulu with a password allowing me to join the fun (my words, not theirs). I was pretty darn excited, Hulu got some pretty good reviews (and I don’t have cable), so I figured I would try it out.
I logged in with the password that was sent to me and I filled out a little form asking for my name, a username, password, etc. I then began looking through the shows that they have on the service, The Office, Family Guy, The Simpsons, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, 24, and so on. There were however some surprises, The A-Team, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, WKRP in Cincinnati, and many other shows from years past.
I went to Family Guys show page and at the bottom of the page is “Title Details,” next to that heading is a link to “Subscribe to show,” I was pretty darn happy that this was there but wasn’t sure how it worked. I clicked on the “?” link and nothing came up it doesn’t link anywhere so finding out information on “subscribe to show” wasn’t going to happen. I subscribed to the show anyway and am very excited to find out what will happen when a new show comes out. I would assume that when a new show comes out it will automatically add it to my “playlist.”
Oh, yes, Hulu allows you to add episodes of shows to a playlist and watch them back to back, this makes for very easy viewing. Before I even watched any videos I added a few of them to my playlist so that I could watch them back to back without having to touch anything.
The ads in Hulu aren’t bad at all. They show up during the time when commercial breaks would be if the show was watched on television but they are usually only 30 second commercial breaks. There is also a banner ad above the video on the video pages.
The video quality looks great, it isn’t exactly up to par with ABC.com’s video service but it is about the same quality as NBC.com’s video service or Fox’s video service. I’m definitely satisfied with how the videos look.
The video player is good also, allowing you to watch the video in the web page, pop it out to its own window, or watch it full screen. You can also embed the video onto your own blog or website by clicking the embed link. Here’s an example of an embedded video:
Another thing that I found pretty interesting is that you can email the video you are watching to a friend, you can even drag a slider to pick exactly what part of the video you want to send.
Overall I’m very happy with Hulu, like I said above I don’t have cable so I could see this being one of my primary sources of video content (second only to podcasts).No, I don’t have any invites for Hulu, basically because there isn’t an invite system in Hulu. If you want to try out Hulu I would suggest doing what I did, go to Hulu.com and put your email address into the box to sign up for the private beta.