Hulu.com

“Founded in March 2007, Hulu is co-owned by NBC Universal, News Corp. and Providence Equity Partners.”

This is the first sentence of the Media Info page of Hulu, a streaming video content site. I wanted to let folks know about Hulu, and I wanted to make it clear right off the bat that it isn’t some kind of copyright infringement/pirating site. It’s 100% legit. And 100% cool. Hulu provides full movies, television series, clips and special features via the internet and they’re constantly adding new stuff. It’s always got very fresh content. If you aren’t familiar with streaming media, it works like this; Hulu sends you the video, say a movie, and your computer receives it on your end. Think You Tube with a quality picture. It’s great because it’s often just like watching TV. The video is buffered so if you need to, you can pause it to let the buffer “fill”. There are many things about Hulu that are sweet, but a couple stand out. In addition to new stuff, Hulu has old classic movies and television shows difficult to find anywhere else. The television shows are usually presented in a full season. I have yet to see a lone TV show without any others in the series. Most movies are full length and it’s clearly indicated. My personal favorite thing about Hulu is that some network shows are released to Hulu right after they air on TV. For instance, I love Dollhouse which airs on Fox Friday nights. Saturday, the previous nights airing of Dollhouse is available on Hulu. I always work friday night, so Hulu is the only way I get to see it. I should mention that Dollhouse is off season now. Just an example. I used to watch Terminator: The Sarah Connor Cronicles the same way until the buttheads at Fox cancelled it. Just like they cancelled Firefly. But that’s a rant for another time.

By the way, all fourteen episodes of Firefly are available here under the “videos” drop down menu, or from the Hulu site itself. See it. Please. SciFi fans will love it.

Did I mention Hulu’s free? Yup. Free

Hulu is ad supported, but the ads are very non intrusive, and there are very few of them. They are single ads, not a minute and a half of multiple commercials. They show up on the time line as dots so you know where they’re going to be, and when they are running the window header says “your video will resume in [number] seconds” . If you quit in the middle of a video, the next time you come back the video will resume where you left off. As a side note, the two most common commercials are for cell phones and charities. Oh, and an edge shave gel commercial that only a guy can appreciate. Very funny.

Hulu has many features that are available if you create an account, also free. You can subscribe to series, make play lists, share favorite videos and more. And you can embed video. Check out Dr. Horrible embedded here.

There are two downsides to Hulu. Hulu can’t be watched outside the United States, apologies to our international friends. And unfortunately, you may experience some lag time, “burps” with a slow line, during peak hours and/or with a slow(er) computer. The latter is especially true of computers running things in the background like firewalls, virus scanners and screen savers. Dial up is definetely a no-go.

For some reason two friends of mine, one running a Mac, and the other a flavor of Linux, get no sound just video. This is strange since the Hulu player is apparently a Flash player. Any browser with Flash (just about all of them) should be able to present the video just fine. Oh well, in a perfect world and all that.

Give it a go. I think you’ll like it. http://www.hulu.com

Denigris