* Hulu has put together a Web-based delivery platform that uses Flash movies and draws from a very large collection of television content
There’s no doubt that here, in the middle of the writer’s strike, television has sunk to new lows. With a dearth of fresh material the networks are pulling the marginal pilots and poorly conceived of reality shows out of mothballs and trying to pass the crud off as entertainment. What a joke.
Makes you wish you’d kept those early episodes of “Heroes” you TiVo’ed but never got around to watching. But what if you could watch them? On demand? On the Web? Ah, yes … this was the stuff that geek dreams were made of and now … ta-da … it’s the stuff that Hulu is delivering.
Hulu, a Los Angeles-based service, has put together a Web-based delivery platform that uses Flash movies and draws from a very large collection of television content from NBC, FX, FOX, Fox Television Classics, FUEL TV, SCI-FI, Bravo, USA, Fox Movie Channel, MGM, and MyNetworkTV.
On demand you can watch not only “Heroes,” but also “The Office” (the U.S. version), “The Simpsons,” and one of my favorites, “Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares,” as well as many other titles in the genres Action and Adventure; Animation; Comedy; Crime and Mystery; Documentary and Biography; Drama; Family and Kids; Horror and Thriller; Lifestyle and Fashion; Reality and Game Show; Sci-Fi and Fantasy; Sports and Fitness; and Talk and Interview (if you’re missing your late night fix there are lots of episodes of “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night with Conan.”
How is this monetized? Advertising, just like regular TV except there’s less of it. In an episode of “Kitchen Nightmares” (the “Lela’s” episode) I figured we were shown about half the usual number of ad slots and there was only one 15 second ad in each slot (unfortunately, they were all those incredibly bad eSurance commercials). Of course Hulu disables all of the controls on the player during the commercials …
You can view programs in a window on a Web page or expand the window to be full screen. There is also a timeline control, volume control, closed captioning, a button to send a link to the show to friends via e-mail, another button to grab code so you can embed the show on another site, which even allows for the creation of clips from shows. You can add your comments to a forum for each show, and give a show a simple one to five star rating.
Overall the performance was pretty good with frame rates that looked to be about 20fps. Sound synchronization was a problem in the Kitchen Nightmares episode I watched and many people commented in the forum on that and problems with closed captioning synchronization as well.
Despite those problems the overall experience was very good. Given that the service is free, the content is great and there’s lots of it, and you can catch up with shows you missed. I think Hulu is a killer Web application.
Hulu is currently in private beta for U.S. users only. To get access go to the Web site home page and apply.
I think Hulu heralds the future of television content delivery along with the realignment of where advertisers put their money for the simple reason that with a service like Hulu advertisers get a remarkably fine-grained view of which shows work and how much exposure they are really getting.
I’m thinking that the networks are going to jump onboard this idea big time. Once they have some new content worth showing.
