Hulu, the New Way of Watching Videos

I've found a lot of stuff in today's USA Today newspaper to google and expand articles with related videos (such as ads or songs discussed in the issue), but in the second half of the day I received an email, that made me explore the other website for the rest of the day.

At last (after just some two months) I've received an invitation to the private beta testing of Hulu.com, a video service that allows to watch videos from Fox, NBC, and other networks online. Sorry, folks, there are no invites here, all you can do is to wait. I suggest going there right now to sign up for a list of beta testers.

A little history... I first learned about this new service during my professor's lecture in the introduction to mass media class. He wondered what the developers have been smoking while they were choosing the name for their startup... Actually, he mixed the name up with lulu (that name would be really fun as it means WC or a sexy baby).

So, after an already unexpected invitation I immediately signed in, changed a default password and took my usual username (oh, how I love to be listed identically everywhere).

In the upper part of the site video titles can be browsed alphabetically, by studio or network (the majority of titles are produced by FOX and NBC) or by popularity.

The videos that currently may be seen on TV are marked with a green circle (there are lots of such shows, including such popular series as House. M. D., The Simpsons, Futurama, Heroes, The Scrubs, The Office, 30 Rock, Prison Break, and others). Most of the studios bumped latest episodes of the shows.

I also found the entire first season of Firefly, whose second is promised to start soon, some episodes from the first and sixth seasons) of 24 as well as Battlestar Galactica, Weird Science (an old show about two geeks that created a robowoman) and even the whole first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Among silly ones is Cleopatra 2525 about girls-warriors (I have already forgotten this show once shown on Ukrainian TV in translation).

The list includes shows I wanted to watch, but could not find in other places. The best example is a horror under the title Alfred Hitchcock Presents...

There is an option to subscribe to the show in their profile (which includes short information about the production and the cast). Doing this allows not to miss the newly added episodes of one's favorite shows.

Besides full-length episodes, there are many short clips from them as well. The gallery of HD-quality trailers offers previews of upcoming movies.

When it came to actually watching, the beta status gave its bugs. First, the flash player refused to load. After it appeared, the loading was slow and resulted in the phrase "Sorry, this video is not available in your region". WTF? An US content doesn't want to air itself in the US? Anyway, I sent feedback to the guys managing the site with descriptions of all the paraphernalia.

At last, after several page refreshes and relogins the player became fully functional and revealed its functions in use.

One can see video details, rate it, send feedback about problems with the service, adjust brightness of the page for better convenience. The Share button as of now simply allows to invite the person to sign up for private beta waiting list so that she or he can watch the video... in several months (yeah, not very useful as a present).

The player can be switched anytime to fullscreen or a resizable pop-up window.

One of the options that can show the powers of Hulu.com to broader audience is embedding it to other sites. You can watch the Halloween special of The Simpsons right here in  my blog post (if you are located in US, of course, or use an American proxy).

Closed captioning is available in English and Spanish (as I have noticed on The Simpsons' video).

The negative moments...

Lots of advertisements appear before the program, several times in the middle (the points of ad pauses are marked on the time bar), and they cannot be skipped or have sound volume changed. Also there is a confrontation between hotkeys in the Firefox browser and Hulu.com (for example, Ctrl+Tab will move you not to another tab, but to the next element of the site). And each time I made my browser fullscreen with the help of F11 button, a new ad interrupted the show. Such bugs in the beginning spoiled the expectations of the site.

Of course, the site requires broadband connection and uses lots of traffic.

Most of the content is available only in the USA, but the site promises worldwide access in future. Discussing boards under the episodes host many screams from "offended" countries. I think, that FOX is not going to give the content to other territories yet. However, more viewers will bring more advertisers...

In the conclusion, Hulu.com is somewhat similar to Joost. The choice is not that big as it seems, and you can get bored after watching all your favorite clips. But now I can embed whole episodes to the blog, and not troubling FOX's copyright infringement team with uploading The Simpsons on YouTube.

Update (August 1, 2008): InviteShare announced that a limited invites to Hulu is available on the first-come, first-serve basis. By now there are 923 left. If you want to check out Hulu.com, hurry up. Don't forget, that the service is available only in US.