Hulu Beta First Impressions
It appears that Hulu started a new round of Beta testing yesterday, and yours truly (along with several other people I know on that were on the waiting list) was invited to participate. As soon as I got home yesterday, I logged in and started playing around. The idea of Hulu sparked my interest when it was first announced shortly after NBC pulled out of iTunes, which is to say free, ad-supported video that you can share and post all over a la YouTube style. The kicker is that the video quality is good, and it's legal. No more random "this video is no longer available" messages when you post that great clip from Family Guy on your blog!
I'll admit, I'm a whore when it comes to Internet video and TV show distribution. The moment that I feel like I can get rid of my cable, I will without a second thought. I've only just begun to dig into Hulu, and it may turn out that I'll be disappointed, but I will definitely give my feedback here regardless of the outcome. As it stands right now, it's hard for me to see things going wrong when the entire first season of Buffy, the entirety of the fabulous Conan flick featuring the Governator, and several episodes of Doogie Howser M.D. with then budding 'mo Neal Patrick Harris! As our very own Tiny Dancer said, we'll just have to wait and see.
PS - Make the jump for a special treat!
One of my favorite things that I've just discovered is, even though there are already some custom clips of shows already on Hulu, you can further customize the clips when you share them. This clip was original 1:45 minutes, but I've shortened it down to 23 seconds. You can cut pieces from both ends, which makes finding your clip easy. Enjoy!
It seems, however, after previewing this article, it looks like after the viewer reaches the cutting point, they will just receive a message saying as much before the clip continues on. I can't tell if that is the intention, or part of the bug being worked out.
Jesse James
Posted to On Your Desk, Videos on 18 December 2007
· Comments (3)
Other stuff like this: beta, Hulu, sharing, video
Hmm... can't say much about the availability of media which sounds nice, but the interface is horrible as far as I'm concerned. The things I look for in an online video interface are, in descending order of importance:
* clean and uncluttered
* easily identifiable tools that function as I expect
* easily identifiable progress bar with an equally identifiable buffered indicator
So far the Hulu interface you've got here doesn't really succeed on any of them.
Then there's the fact that it crashed my browser when it ended, but that could have been more of an issue of resources being used
I hope this thing doesn't catch on too much. Seeing one of these embedded is really annoying if you live outside the US and can't actually watch it.
I can't really speak to the interface being useful, and the player definitely didn't crash my browser, but that's because I can't watch any of the videos, since I'm not presently in the US. And bouncing my IP to somewhere in the US is far too much of a bother just to be able to see new television shows. (Although I really want to see boston legal with Phyllis Diller.)