Hands On With Hulu

After waiting most of the day for approval from Hulu PR, I can now post a hands-on evaluation of the beta, which was officially announced at midnight Sunday night. (When registering, the terms of service repeatedly failed to load, meaning that I had no idea if Hulu would make me watch old episodes of The Littlest Groom if I posted content without permission.)

The verdict: Broad? Extremely. Deep? No. If you were hoping for some magical archive of TV episodes, forget it. This is why piracy is winning, people. But give Hulu credit: what it does, it does well.







Fortunately, the site has learned several key lessons from the Web 2.0 design gurus: keep it clean, keep it simple, and organize it well. While you won't find any user-generated video here, both studios have presented their gems, front and center. Take for, example, the once-lost version of Saturday Night Live's "Lazy Sunday: The Chronicles of Narnia":



And that's one of the nifty things. Video can be embedded into blogs. Sure, you'll still end up watching the commercials, but that's the tradeoff. Oh, and design for widescreen.

Only the last aspect needs some more work. If you're looking for a certain show, clicking on the "Browse Titles" link at the top of the page will bring up a list of shows, each adorned by a small banner icon. No preference is given to either NBC shows or Fox properties; each is treated equally.



But Hulu made one mystifying decision: in the page marked "Popular Episodes," the user is subjected to a two-wide column of "favorites," with no indication whose favorites they are. Users? The site's editors? NBC executives, in a back-room deal with Fox? Some indication would be helpful. The same treatment is given to the bottom of the home page.




Playing a show is straightforward: once you click on the episode, a window opens with some interesting options: "Lower lights" turns the surrounding white background a dark gray, making extended viewing easier on the eyes. There's the standard "embed" and "share" options, as well as "details". For some reason, Hulu included both a "share" and "pop out" option, to give you two options to view.





There are ads, although the presentation isn't consistent; when I viewed a Simpsons episode Monday morning, the episode started with a short lead-in, and then 15- and 30-second ads played during the normal commercial breaks. (There are strange dots within the time slider that I believe correspond to commercial breaks.) However, on Monday afternoon, the ads were gone, even during a watching of the same episode.

The video is crisp and smooth, when it loads. For some reason, I received several instances of the following error message, one when trying to view an episode of House, and once when I tried to view The Blues Brothers: "Unfortunately, this video is not currently available in your country or region. We apologize for the inconvenience."

It's not quite clear what this means, since I'm sitting in Arizona right now. Has John McCain really ticked off Hollywood that badly?

The other problem is actually getting the video to load. Again, on Monday morning the experience was seamless: video loaded seamlessly, and everything worked as you would expect. At 3:15 PM PDT, it took about ten seconds to load a video page, perhaps fifteen seconds for it to actually begin, and even then the audio had a tendency to desynchronize -- evidence, it seems, of problems with the server load.

The sad thing is that Hulu will only archive the last five episodes of a current show, and a single season of a show that's off the air -- typically the first season, but not always. On the other hand, it's an excellent way to keep up with shows that don't quite make your DVR for reasons of scheduling or capacity.




Hulu suffers from two beta problems right now: an apparent lack of server capacity, and a deep stable of content. I have every confidence that Hulu will solve the first, and will refuse to solve the latter. Which, when you think about it, is just plain dumb. Yes, advertising is annoying, but it pays my bills. I'm willing to put up with it. But if the model works for the five most recent episodes of a given show, it should work for all of them. Let's hope this changes.