NBC/FOX’s Hulu.com Receives Positive Reviews and a 24 Year Old Thinks It’s Cool
The much talked about online joint venture between FOX and NBC Hulu.com officially launched this past week. After being in beta for a very long time, the site is officially open, launched, and gathering some great reviews. If you haven’t signed up, you really should before you miss the boat and feel like one of those losers who only has 10 friends on Facebook because you thought you were too cool for it when it got started.
Once, I was an early adopter of Facebook at USC, one of only 30 people on the network. I started inviting many a friend, who told me “This is stupid, why would I want people to stalk me?” I promised them it would be big and awesome because it had already caught on all down the East Coast. Now, it is awesome.
What is one of the next things that I think is awesome? Hulu.
What does a 24 year old guy like me think about Hulu? Me thinks Hulu is awesome - really, really awesome. While not all NBC and FOX content is on the site, the potential of having a site like Hulu act as your DVR that you don’t have to program, nor worry about running out of space is really a very exciting concept. I’m not going to pretend that something like this hasn’t been done before (what up to Comcast’s Fancast, which has so many full episodes that it almost takes a doodoo on Hulu), but there is something about Hulu that makes up for the current shortcomings in content.
Embedding. Mutha-effing-Embedding.
While Comcast’s Fancast is pretty much one of the Internetz little-known secrets as I think less than a million people actually go there every month, I think that a lot of that is because all of the content lives on the Comcast spinoff website. You have to go to Fancast, find your TV show, then you can watch full episodes, even at full screen, which is very cool! But before everyone starts crapping their pants over Fancast now that you actually know it exists, enter Hulu’s embedding.
So yes, Hulu has full episodes of shows like The Office, Kitchen Nightmares, and Heroes, along with viral video friendly clips like SNL digital shorts that you can embed like you would with a YouTube clip, just like this:
Not only can you embed full episodes of television shows and clips, but you can embed a feature length movie! Like Ice Age!
To me, that is awesome. Not that I’d ever expect anyone to sit here for two hours and watch Ice Age on my blog, but just the fact that you can take this content wherever you want makes it very exciting.
While I love the interface, navigation, and the solid start on content (Keeping Up with the Kardashians clips FTW!), my big question mark and complaint about the product is why the standard embedding size is 510 x 295? The 510 width is wide enough to “break” most people’s layouts on Blogger or Wordpress, so it forces us to bust out the computer calculators to manually resize the videos when we’re embedding them. It just seems like it would make a whole lot more sense of the videos could be easily embedded in different sizes, not a huge complaint, but a noticeable oversight nonetheless.
Way back, Hulu was being called a “YouTube killer,” but the reality is that it’s a completely different product. While YouTube will seemingly always have clips that eventually get taken down as a result of copyright infringement, Hulu and Fancast are legal ways to check out full episodes and clips of professional, licensed content. While Fancast has more “stuff,” Hulu took things in a different direction by letting any of this licensed content live anywhere on the web, just like a YouTube clip.
While there will always be a place for people to watch dogs riding skateboards or a kid trying to dunk a basketball on a trampoline only to get stuck in a hoop like they can on YouTube, Hulu is kind of like putting together the professional cousin of YouTube. It’s kind of like YouTube put on a suit and decided to get all serious, but that doesn’t mean that YouTube isn’t still fun with its sweatpants and hoodie on.
The more and more that sites like Hulu and Fancast keep popping up, the more that it justifies me wanting to purchase Mac Mini solely to stream content onto my 40″ LCD HDTV. As the computer becomes more and more central to every home, it’s sites like Hulu and Fancast that make one think that the DVR is simply enjoying a good run for now.
So jump on that Hulu bandwagon before it’s “so two weeks ago.”
