Hulu: How To Get Started And Make Most of Web TV, Video

Hulu, the online video service that allows you to watch many of your favorite television shows and even some full-length movies, has been available for about a year now. Leading up to its launch, some wondered how the company would manage the challenges anyonline video site faces, including issues of copyright and creating a sustainable ad model.

But during the last year especially, Hulu has blossomed into a site where you can access great programming, legally, and with exceptional video quality. It's not hard to get started using Hulu, either.

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Hulu, the online video service that allows you to watch many of your favorite television shows and even some full-length movies, has been available for about a year now. Leading up to its launch, some wondered how the company would manage the challenges anyonline video site faces, including issues of copyright and creating a sustainable ad model.

But during the last year especially, Hulu has blossomed into a site where you can access great programming, legally, and with exceptional video quality. It's not hard to get started using Hulu, either.

More on CIO.com Online Video Usage Continues to Grow New Tool To Help Companies Deal With Bandwidth Challenges of Online Video Facebook Connect: What's Next for Your Facebook Info?

For those of you who haven't heard of the service or are just getting started, this review will center on the site's basic features and offer tips for making the most of your Hulu profile. In general, Hulu has done much to balance the needs of monetizing online video with ads while creating a very solid end-user experience, all for free.

The benefits of signing up

You can access the videos on Hulu without a user name and password, but you will miss out on a lot of the site's extra features, such as creating a queue of favorite programs or writing a review of a video to share with other Hulu users.

Though Hulu hasn't added single sign-on features from Google's Friend Connect or Facebook Connect, signing up is pretty simple. (Click on sign upin the upper right hand corner of the Hulu homepage).

Hulu doesn't ask for too much information (e-mail, first and last name), but it does want your birth date and zip code for the sake of serving up more relevant ads for your programming.

The video player

Hulu sports a very sleek video player that has earned it many accolades, including being named the best technology product of 2008 by our sister site PC World. It works on Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer.

I would like to see support for Google Chrome, seeing as Hulu runs a fair amount of javascript, a programming language that the Google made browser handles very well. You also must have Adobe Flash Player 9.0 in order to play videos.

Hulu Online Video

Below is a video clip from The Office, one of the shows featured on Hulu. The actual Hulu video player is wider and longer than the video screen below, which I scaled to this text column. You can try this clip and others at Hulu.com.

The difference between Hulu's video player and the one most us will compare it to ( YouTube) is similar to mobile phones in a way. YouTube's play, pause, and volume buttons, as well as the progress bar, remain visible and always there (like a traditional BlackBerry). A Hulu player, on the other hand, waits until you've scrolled your mouse over the screen to light up the buttons (like the touchscreen feel of an iPhone), giving it an elegant design.

Hulu requires a fast internet connection to enjoy the streaming video without any latency. According to Hulu's support page, videos typically stream at 480 kilobits per second (Kbps) or 700 Kbps. Hulu, for its part, recommends a bandwidth of 1,000 Kbps or higher for the "smoothest playback experience." If that all sounds like gibberish, go to Speedtest.net, a free site that will calculate your bandwidth speed to see if your connection makes the grade.