Guest Author - Dani M. Sanders

Hulu.com is a streaming online video service whose prominent partners include NBC and Fox. The catalog has a variety of old and new series from both networks as well as some of their sister stations such as SciFi Channel, Bravo, and FX. There are also clips produced by some websites like IGN and CNET. My interest when I signed up for the private beta was primarily the NBC shows. I didn't have much luck with the streaming video on NBC main website, so I was hoping that Hulu would work better for me.

Hulu's only job is to offer streaming video, which makes the interface clean and easy to use. You can browse shows by network, by popularity, by current shows, or by alphabetical order. Once you pick one of those categories, then you can filter by genre. The NBC list matched the list on the main NBC site, meaning that if NBC doesn't offer full episodes on their main site then you won't find them on Hulu, either. Since you have to sign in to use the site, that means there is a profile of what you watched previously. You can even create a playlist of shows that you want to watch at another time. To get you started on that, there are several pre-made playlists that Hulu calls collections.

The Hulu player has several useful options. I've seen one or two of these options on various sites, but this is the first time I have seen them all in one player. There is a Details button that gives you information such as the name of the episode, when it originally aired, and a brief plot description. You can give the video content a star rating or give feedback on the playback quality. You can share the video by sending an email link or embedding it in an entry on your blog or website. There is even a cool option called Lower Lights that lets you darken everything else on the screen around the video. I don't know a lot about video resolution, but I can tell you that the video was crisp and clear on my flat-screen computer monitor. If your only experience with online video is YouTube, then you will be pleasantly surprised.

The main complaint I have heard around the blogosphere is that you can't access Hulu from outside the US. That is a shame, but it also seems to be common practice among network sites. US viewers can't watch streaming video from sites in other countries such as the BBC, either. I wouldn't hold that against Hulu. A more serious problem, at least to me, is that some of the shows expire. The episodes of Chuck that I watched online one week were already gone the next week. According to the FAQ on the site, Hulu has different agreements with different companies. Some allow their shows to be on the site indefinitely while others enforce a time limit. I would like to see Hulu putting an expiration date next to those episodes that will expire. It would be pretty frustrating to add something to your playlist today so you could watch it next week, only to find it gone.

What's my final verdict? I think that Hulu.com is a great site and much more user-friendly than the official NBC site. Hulu was still in private beta as of March 1, 2008 but they give each user 10 invites. If you search online you may find someone who has a few invites to spare.