Hulu is for Real

For the past demi-year, Hulu has been officially open as a beta to consumers. But as part of the Canadian public, I’ve lacked the opportunity to try such a service as it was unfortunately unavailable in my region at this time. Either way, I’ve finally arrived south of the border, and I’m dying to try this service out. Luckily, I was able to access the service – if I weren’t, I might’ve died.

Hulu has a wide variety of shows, which all seem to appeal to me. They are all hits on TV, and they are all widely available on the internet – something that Hulu is trying to discourage by officially offering a medium to watch such shows. However, I must object – when you are trying to discourage piracy, please try to include the rest of the world – just something to take into consideration.

A spectrum of features are made available – in fact, something to the most minute detail like changing the background colour is available for the comfort of your eyes. The overall GUI is pretty and goes well with the whole glass look of the new Web, as well as Vista. They also go so far as to offer summaries and user opinions of the shows they offer.

The most important feature of a video site has to be the playback – which I must admit, disappointed me a bit. I must mention that I am using wi-fi, so I might not be getting as strong a signal as I could be, but I still think that streaming a video should be much smoother. I had to wait a while for the video to load, as it was quite choppy at first. Also, it’s resolution isn’t as nice as something like Veoh’s, so I think it wasn’t really worth the hype. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still above Youtube par, but I was certainly expecting more.

Hulu looks very promising at the moment, and if it progresses then it should be a feasible alternative to piracy. However, I’m begging Hulu creators to please make the service more widely available, and to make the videos load faster as well as in higher quality. If you’re still in Canada right now, then you’re really missing out.