Hulu Review

Hulu, just like YouTube, is a site that streams videos. It has one major difference though, and that is the fact that it hosts premium content, and is 100% legal. What I mean by premium content, is real full length episodes of TV shows. No joke folks, this is for real!

How do they do it?

It’s common sense that a service can’t just get out there, and legally offer free content, especially television shows. What they do is put a 10 second ad at the beginning and then about every 8 minutes (approximate, but it is actually dependent on the video length) they play a new ad. These ads are all videos, and are in the flash player itself. As for the layout, it is ad free apart from a little ad in the top right corner that shows the last sponsor that the player showed.

Selection

When I say everything I don’t mean everything, but I do mean a lot. Seriously, this service is stashed. From Family Guy, to The Simpsons, to SNL.

Movies

Yes it’s true, recently they updated their service to allow users to watch movies; both full length and in clips. The ad rule still applies, but you’ll find that it really isn’t much of a problem. Heck, now you don’t have to spend $15 at the iTunes store, everyone wins!

Open Beta

This is something that many new services have been doing, including GMail. The theory is that if you put a service in beta, it build up both hype and anticipation. When the lucky few share they’re wonderful experience, others become envious and in turn will wait day by day until the service is available to the public. Well Hulu did just that, and they are currently getting the same amount of traffic as Oprah.com! Anyways, if you don’t want to go looking around for invitations, Hulu is now available to the public!

Design

The designers behind the site really did a superb job to capture a simple streaming website. So clean and elegant, yet supplies and displays the data in a way that makes it really easy to navigate.

Custom Video Player

They created and coded their very own custom video player. Like I earlier stated, it incorporates the ads into the system and also included a whole bunch of other features that other players don’t have. One of the neatest features, is the fact that it auto-saves your exact location in any of the movies you have watched. In my case, I was watching a Family Guy episode when my computer crashed. When I rebooted, logged back in, and navigated back to the video, it had remembered my exact location and started up right away. Some of the other features include full screen, pop out, lower lights, Hi-Res, details, share, and of course embed. Although I haven’t tried it out, I’m guessing that if you own a domain such as LostEpisodes.com, you could probably just embed all of the videos onto your site through Hulu in order to provide content that would never disappear.

Our Rating

The whole entire Talk Price staff thinks that this service is a must. We all use it extremely frequently, and would rate this ( 4.5 / 5 )

Recommendations

We would recommend that in the future, Hulu expands their horizons, and offers a wider range of TV shoes as well as a larger list of movies.