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…