Hulu goes live
posted at 1:42 pm on March 12, 2008 by Allahpundit
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We’re looking at a slow, Spitzery news day this afternoon so here’s something to play with. Remember this post, written one year ago almost to the day about a deal among the major networks to launch their own competitor to YouTube? They’ve done it; the site, Hulu, debuts today. Poke around and see what they’ve got cooking. The major partners right now are NBC and News Corp., i.e. Fox, but they’re working on deals with Warner Bros., the NBA, and the NHL, among others. I won’t bore you with yet another rehash of where this is all heading, especially since RedLasso’s already nine-tenths of the way there, but it’ll be interesting to watch the jockeying going forward between Hulu, the content providers’ site, YouTube, the content users’ site, and RL, which is sort of a mix of the two.
According to B&C, Hulu’s content inventory has quadrupled in the four months since the beta launched five months ago. Some of it’s very thin and weak. Some of it … not so much.
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So they are doing full feature ? Cool. Hope they get some good stuff up there
William Amos on March 12, 2008 at 1:46 PM
Yep. Except I can’t view it from my ‘country or region,” i.e. Canada. I have to stick with youtube, and others, until I move back to the good ol’ USA.
Why is everything better in the US?
nailinmyeye on March 12, 2008 at 1:46 PM
Great, another youtube-ish site. I barely get enough work done as it is.
Geronimo on March 12, 2008 at 1:48 PM
“…intended only for matooor audiences…”
(By a bunch of amatooors who don’t know about literatooor.)
Tzetzes on March 12, 2008 at 1:51 PM
is there any point in getting Blu-Ray and buying DVD’s with where we are obviously headed here?
jp on March 12, 2008 at 1:51 PM
am the only one who thought this movie was incredibly stupid?
lorien1973 on March 12, 2008 at 1:52 PM
Hey watchit man, that’s my beverage you’re spilling.
Thanks Big A
LebowskiKini on March 12, 2008 at 1:52 PM
Nope. the BluRay/HD-DVD was only about who gets to claim to be the last type of disc before things went completely digital.
lorien1973 on March 12, 2008 at 1:53 PM
There seems to be a lot of commercials though.
Lance Murdock on March 12, 2008 at 1:57 PM
Dude! You embedded the entire movie “The Big Lebowski” on your site. That’s so awesome it feels illegal.
frankj on March 12, 2008 at 1:58 PM
That rug tied the room together, man.
darury on March 12, 2008 at 1:58 PM
Wow. Fullscreen 480p mode on my 24″ LCD monitor actually is very good quality. No lag or skipping on what I watched either. Pretty good selection right now and the “coming soon” stuff looks pretty good. Unfortunately, it’s all old stuff. But lots of classics and stuff for your enjoyment.
I signed up.
SilverStar830 on March 12, 2008 at 2:01 PM
There are. But, if you watch at the Hulu website all you have to do is watch a new movie trailer or some other 2minute 30second commercial and the rest is commercial free.
SilverStar830 on March 12, 2008 at 2:02 PM
Possibly, but we’re still aways away from it being practical to stream 1080p / 7.1 channel content on demand (aside from a limited collection cached by your local service provider), or even store it locally.
ErikTheRed on March 12, 2008 at 2:04 PM
CAPTIONS! I want closed captions for the deaf and hard of hearing!
Anything else is just more internet fluff that doesn’t help me.
Vatican Watcher on March 12, 2008 at 2:06 PM
Awww, man, how will I get ANY work done now?????
ihasurnominashun on March 12, 2008 at 2:06 PM
Hulu is cool but it still has a long way to go.
Lance Murdock on March 12, 2008 at 2:06 PM
I had a good amount of work done, too.
You just broke my stride.
emailnuevo on March 12, 2008 at 2:10 PM
Dude! So this is where you got your dude thing… dude
ulyses on March 12, 2008 at 2:11 PM
“It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child…”
Heh. The Jerk is available. So much for productivity.
Slublog on March 12, 2008 at 2:13 PM
I wonder where all of this will lead…….
Seven Percent Solution on March 12, 2008 at 2:14 PM
Definitely going to be a distracting time-killer. Lots of good old TV shows there.
I wonder if the original Battlestar is going be chopped up as bad as the SciFi channel had it, or will it be from the original airings?
JamesLee on March 12, 2008 at 2:14 PM
I’ve been part of the beta. It’s great!
darii on March 12, 2008 at 2:16 PM
Not available in my area, either. Granted, that would be South Korea, but even the guy from my homeland (Canada) is banned? Sucks. We don’t even have copyright laws in Korea, from what I can tell from my 5-for-$10 bootlegs and bars named everything from Starbucks to Cheers to Bill Cosby’s.
Are lame-ass SNL skits too subversive for non-Americans?
Hulu = uh…. Hu-luh-hell-are-you-foreigners? Hu-luh-stank?
SeoulMan on March 12, 2008 at 2:22 PM
Hu Cares?
Neo on March 12, 2008 at 2:49 PM
Filled with commercials, can’t watch it on my 42″ plasma TV via AppleTV, can’t watch it without an internet connection and can’t watch it on my iPhone. Hu cares about this crap.
Neo on March 12, 2008 at 2:50 PM
William Gibson could have seen this coming.
- The Cat
MirCat on March 12, 2008 at 2:56 PM
Indeed. :-/
OneGyT on March 12, 2008 at 3:05 PM
Aaaaand the IT security group at my work ALREADY has Hulu filtered out for being a high-bandwidth site. That didn’t take long.
wearyman on March 12, 2008 at 3:13 PM
Just watched the Girl Next Door, the chick looked good in her silkies and frillies. Lots of Comercials, pretty good clarity. Buffered pretty quickly.
Alden Pyle on March 12, 2008 at 4:10 PM
I wonder if the launch of hulu had anything to do with the end of the writer’s strike. You know, that was all about the proceeds from online content.
otcconan on March 12, 2008 at 5:01 PM
Oh, and thanks a lot, Allah. I just watched the whole thing. Never had seen it all the way through, and didn’t really get it until now.
Dude…that movie is heavy.
otcconan on March 12, 2008 at 5:02 PM
I’m not really impressed.
ABC’s online HiDef shows a better glimpse of where things headed. It stream/caches 2GB to your hard drive for 720p over the internet. That’s impressive.
But… Firefly online is nice. Check out Original Star Trek on CBS’s site.
Agrippa2k on March 12, 2008 at 5:47 PM
I started watching Benson recently on Hulu. Funny.
Weebork on March 12, 2008 at 5:58 PM
This is seriously cool. Sadly, the PS3 browser does not yet support this site (it does work for youtube…). I will now get even less done around the house. Thank God I did my taxes all ready!
So far any streamed HD is still ‘hd-lite’… as far as I have seen – however I haven’t scouted ABC’s site yet. It will be a very, very long time before I stop using Blu-Ray discs.
George Ou of zdnet has a great rundown.
Checkout the table that shows the comparable bit rates…
darkpixel on March 12, 2008 at 6:08 PM
I almost forgot: This site also shows how much the TV industry has changed…. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea had over 30 episodes in it’s first season. And the episodes are over 50 minutes. Fast forward 40 years… and the seasons seem to be 18 episodes, and only 42 or 43 minutes of air time.
darkpixel on March 12, 2008 at 6:16 PM
Very Cool “Master and Commander” worked perfect,commercials were quite bearable,
Bob
Bobnormal on March 12, 2008 at 6:33 PM
I’ve enjoyed Hulu during the beta.
openhulu.com has also been nice.
The lack of a variety of sponsors makes a full-length feature a bit annoying – the same ad, over and over, throughout an episode? Gah! – but I still like the streaming, the full-screen capability, and the fact that I don’t have to give Steve Jobs another two bucks every time I forget to set the TiVo.
sulla on March 12, 2008 at 6:41 PM
Well, for a guy that watches maybe two hours of entertainment TV (Other than news and some Discovery educational type shows) a week, looks like I’m going to be watching the computer a lot. They have several full series from back when there WAS good stuff on the networks.
Hooray, HULU.
LegendHasIt on March 12, 2008 at 6:49 PM
Anyone having a problem using MicrosoftXP wth HULU.
I’ve made two attempts, but the video will not stream. I get only bits and pieces at a time.
Any suggestions???
pocomoco on March 12, 2008 at 7:48 PM
Thanks for the Lebowski link. One of my all-time favourite movies :)
LimeyGeek on March 12, 2008 at 7:50 PM
Buddy, in the UK, a season is 8 programs max, 30 mins each. Typically. Or at least it was when I lived there nearly a decade ago.
LimeyGeek on March 12, 2008 at 7:53 PM
Never mind, it’s working now!
pocomoco on March 12, 2008 at 8:11 PM
Mark it 8 Dude!
HockeyTemper on March 12, 2008 at 8:57 PM
There is some interesting content, and better quality then one might get using Youtube or something similar. Plus, no chance of getting a cease and desist order for using it :)
Shame that the vids are so wide, though. They should have a few different sizes.
William Teach on March 12, 2008 at 9:25 PM
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