I received my Hulu beta invite last night, and I’ve got to say the service is looking pretty good. If you recall, the Hulu video portal was originally conceived of by NBC and is now an independent entity with various studio and web relationships.
At this point, the Hulu site is pretty spartan (too much white space and sharp edges) and content organization options are basic (please give me a filter to hide video more than a decade old like Kojak and Dragnet), but having a significant amount of primetime multi-studio television shows in the stable is huge. I also appreciate the simple, Flash-based video playback interface over a stand-alone application (think Joost).
I’m having home networking probs this week, and was unable to transfer 30 Rock from the Series3 to the TiVo HD. Instead of troubleshooting, I caught “Cougars” via Hulu in fullscreen. The resolution wasn’t great for my 1440×900 Macbook Pro, but it was watchable. And the few commercials were relatively painless – a good excuse to check email in another Firefox tab. In fact, I also ended up viewing the pilot episode of USA’s Burn Notice – it’s on hiatus but Mari’s been raving about it. Maybe someone at Hulu will read this and post the remaining episodes…
Burn Notice is a surprisingly fun show … we got hooked on it over the summer after reading a review somewhere. Was pretty clever and well done. And it has Gabrielle Anwar in Miami .. need I say more? :-)
It mis quote Yoda…”Gone to the Dark Side, Dave has.”
I will start a grass roots campaign to bring you back to the side of good, and ask all the readers of this excellent blog for your help.
Save Dave!
Hulu was a surprise for me too (few weeks back) – I let 5 Family Guy episodes roll back-to-back while working one day.
My Tivo is set for Burn Notice and Monk – great and fun shows.
My teenage sons call me to come watch Burn Notice with them!!
Would love to try Hulu sometime.
I’ll give another endorsement for Burn Notice. Pretty funny with a little action. Kind of like a low budget non-hd “Chuck”. Not bad for a summer series.