I wanted to take a moment out to give kudos to the folks behind Hulu. Remember how much criticism and naysaying they got before and during their launch? It must feel good to have executed so well, and the content they have is really killer. You can watch all of Fifth Element, for example.
Well they seem really nice matt, but one thing bothers me they are for U.S citizens only 🙁
so all out of U.S are left with nothing 🙁
Hulu rocks! I use it for strictly movies and Family Guy though 🙂
Hulu is awesome… I posted a video named crawford on my Blog that hosted by them:
http://www.politicalbyline.com/2008/10/13/a-political-byline-special-presentation-crawford/
Excellent movie and excellent service.
Hulu is neat, but has always lacked that certain set of features that would make me consider it as anything more than a toy.
See, their main set of content is whole movies and tv episodes. The quality is impressive, and the few ads I see don’t bother me. What does bother me is the lack of portability of the thing. I can only watch Hulu on my computer. For actual television type content, this is a deal-breaker.
When I can play Hulu on my XBox with XBMC, or through my Tivo, then I’ll be interested in using it. As it stands though, all I can do is stream the material to my PC. Sure, there’s some programs out there capable of downloading the content, but I’d rather just go elsewhere.
Here’s the thing: Downloading high definition content through “illegal” sites is a) easier, b) ad-free, c) far higher quality, d) smaller filesizes, and e) downloadable instead of streaming. Plus, that material plays on any device I have. And with modern software, I can set up an RSS reader to grab all the shows I want by simply typing in the names of those shows, then it auto finds and downloads that show, forever. For free. It’s a killer user experience, takes almost no technical know-how, and gives me all the TV/Movies I want.
So if Hulu or the networks backing them want me to actually watch their content, then they need to duplicate that ease of use and capabilities. Streaming vs. downloading I really could care less about, and I’d live with ads as long as I had a extremely large selection to choose from, but if the material won’t play where I want it to play, then the material is useless to me.
I like it. It’s grown on me. I like the little options like turn-the-lights-down.
I just wish for little things like dofollow links in my bio. I’d feel more apt to use their widgets on my site if there was a fair trade.
No such luck right now, so I won’t use their goodies in my blogs.
The idea behind Hulu is quite interesting but it’s sad to see that their video content can only be streamed within the US.
Every single episode of Arrested Development and Firefly are on there too.
http://www.hulu.com/arrested-development
http://www.hulu.com/firefly
Re: Otto
Convenience is not an excuse for stealing content. I agree it would be nice to have it play on my iPhone, TiVo, etc, but that doesn’t make it right to illegally obtain the shows.
@Otto
While I agree that there’s more that Hulu can do, I think that your comparison is flawed. If the sites are actually illegal (and not “illegal”), then your comparison is like saying that it’s easier to rob a bank than work for 10 years. While that statement is true, that raises other issues that need to be addressed.
With all of that said, I still think that Hulu would benefit from looking at some of the issues that you’ve raised.
I totally agree. When Hulu first launched, it had a host of problems and much of the content was unwatchable due to misplaced ads and some weird Amazon buy feature. But since then they have executed well, stayed the course, and created a very usable web property.
hulu is awesome and if you have an apple tv, http://www.boxee.tv/ is where you need to go. We don’t have cable in our house anymore, just two apple tv’s where we can watch whatever we want to whenever we want to. And soon with netflix support, movies.
My favorite is that people still don’t know about hulu. When people ask how can i live without cable, i just reply with hulu. I have to write it down for them or email it to them so they will remember.
@Otto: You’re arguing that you can’t download it and play it on your hacked xbox like you can with illegally downloaded versions? They have to appease the content owner to some degree… You could play the content easily on a television that was hooked up to a multimedia PC that had web access…
The best thing on Hulu is Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog with Neil Patrick Harris. It cracks me up.
It’s still frustrating that certain tv networks will only release episodes after a significant delay. For example, if I miss an episode of House, I can’t catch up until 8 days later, meaning I also have to miss the next week’s episode if I want to watch them in order.
Of course this isn’t Hulu’s fault; it’s Fox’s. But my point is that at least for some TV shows, Hulu can only be as good as the networks. The networks are (purposefully) holding back the market, and it’s very annoying.
Sons of Anarchy rules!!
I hafta agree with ‘The Wizard’, All of us living outside the U.S. cannot use the service. I understand the whole licensing thing, but it’s still totally uncool that I can’t watch TV shows from the U.S. via the net; Heroes, for instance.
It’s easy to proxy. 🙂
OpenVPN just launched for practically this very thing.
@ Otto
Use PlayOn (http://www.themediamall.com/playon). I’ve been running Hulu and Netflix streaming through my Xbox XBMC with no problem.
Outside the US, you can use a proxy quite easily.
proxy is good if there was cache because proxy is slow. pause doesn’t work well in this case.
I have to admit, Hulu turned out much better than I thought it would. I was in the beta testing group, and before the official launch, they definitely had bandwidth problems. Videos used to stop and start constantly. But they got that fixed, and by the time of the official launch, the underlying technology was working pretty well. I think they did a great job of organizing content, and making it searchable. I use it for The Office, 30 Rock, and Chuck now, and it is usually a pretty great experience. It is definitely exciting to see where iptv is going.
I only have a few small complaints now. The first is that episodes expire. I am sure this is because of bad licensing deals, but I would love to go back and watch episodes of current shows, from past seasons. My second complaint is that they have too many clips and previews mixed in with the full episodes and movies. I realize they did this to make it look like they have tons of content, but I would rather not see these in my search results. These are pretty minor though. Overall, I think they are doing a great job.
too bad im not from the US 🙁