<mini rant>

So I finally had my first real reason to go try Hulu tonight. I somehow completely forgot that Battlestar Galactica had started again, and as the only show I am catching somewhat near the live release, I had in interest in seeing it. First stop out of habit was to go to iTunes and get ready to fork over $1.99 for my forgetfulness. After searching for a bit I finally remembered NBC Universal left iTunes a while back. Then I remembered Hulu. So I opened Safari on the Mac Mini attached to the TV, found the show, and was presented with a white box where it should be, and Safari indicating it was waiting on one more piece of data. I stop, try again, same result. I then try on my laptop, same result. So no I figure it is my internet connection, and I reset the modem, wireless access point, powerplug bridges, and everything. Same issue. I do a bandwidth test, looks fine, and a download from Fileplanet confirms this. I start to give up, then conveniently find that SciFi was going to run it again at 10, and I have access to cable now that the roomate is subscribing. So I told the Replay to record it and watched it that way, at poor analog non HD cable quality, but without commercials at least.

Once it ended, I wandered back to my laptop, hit reload, and it now decided to work. Out of curiosity, I let it play a bit, and flipped into full screen while Activity monitor was on the other screen. 130% processor use on a 2.0 ghz Core Duo (OS X measures 100% as one core of use), and the quality wasn't much better then the analog cable feed I just watched. Full screen 1080p h.264 trailers don't even take as much processing power.

So anyhow, how is Hulu really all that great? It failed to deliver that "I really want to watch it now" part due to who knows what problem. I was even willing to pay to see the episode, and couldn't. It cripples even a moderately modern machine, excluding many internet users out there from a decent experience because of absolute crap performance of Flash for this. I can appreciate the fact that I didn't have to use some Microsoft solution, but still, how did this improve the situation over what iTunes offered two years ago?

*sigh*

</mini rant>

Well, there's always the pirate BitTorrent route...

Well, the reason Hulu is better, nominally, is that you do have immediate access to those shows. Yeah, it's not exactly optimized, but it's easy, it runs everywhere, and you don't have to have a huge amount of bandwidth. I'm sure those were their criteria for the service, not super-high-quality video.

On the other side of the coin, it wasn't working for you. Well, sometimes things don't work, but that doesn't make the thing bad unless it consistently doesn't work. You don't complain about your credit card "not being better" when the retailer's POS system isn't working. It's still annoying, of course.

Everywhere a modern (less then 2 years old) computer is anyhow, and easy with a mouse and keyboard. The only reason I considered even going to Hulu was because I'm in the very small minority of people who have a full computer attached to the TV. iTunes, the Xbox, and a few other solutions offer ways to watch on a TV, but not Hulu. While I can see the usefulness of the service, I question why Universal pulled out of any other services to go exclusively to Hulu. Especially when other services were a pay service that had people like me willing to hand over cash for a better experience.

Yeah, it's clear that quality is not the focus of Hulu. It's better than Youtube, but not as good as iTunes (which I don't think is very good to begin with).

Here's the nice thing about it: I was working on something late at night recently, and decided to take a break and watch something. I decided to check this Hulu thing out and see what TV shows were available. I was surprised to see that Kitchen Confidential, a show that was on the air briefly a few years ago, had all its episodes on the service (13 episodes total, 9 of which were never broadcast). I was able to watch all the episodes, and though before each one I got a message saying "Brought to you with limited interruptions by ...", I never saw a single commercial during the episode.

That said, I repeat, the quality is bad. First, the version of the show that Hulu had was 4:3. Second, as I asked about in a previous post, I got about a 8-10 framerate at full screen. Third, the video quality was average at best.

So yeah, I "obtained it through other means," and got the 16:9 DVD quality versions that ran at full screen/framerate.

They've still got a little ways to go before they're offering something that has an advantage over piracy. I think they're really close, though.