Hulu officially launched on Wednesday after an extended and very successful period in beta. 

Hulu is a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corporation which offers multiple online videos. 

As listed on their blog, while announcing the launch:

“Today we are excited to leave our private beta and open Hulu.com to everyone in the U.S.”

So what is the Hulu experience? That depends on your expectations and starting point. I’m going to start with the technical experience since that is how I approached de-constructing the site.

Speed Tests

The picture below illustrates there is a fair amount of distance between the user and the media, 12 hops with an average of 168 ms in my ping test.

I emailed Jason kilar, CEO of Hulu to inquire if they are using edge servers or any form of P2P network (since they are good at moving large files) however, he did not respond.

The speed tests I ran (East Coast, West Coast and that Middle part at 6:00am shows my bandwidth is not constrained which has me wondering why the 1280×720 HD delivery would not play without stuttering? 

The smaller size (360 or 480p) played without any problems. According to that part of the site, Flash 9 and a 2.5MB connection are the minimum requirements; processor/memory is not an issue with my workstation and I used FireFox 2.0 in my tests.

Having tested the technical quality and transport of Hulu content, both in SD and HD, I was satisfied with SD delivery and quality but unsatisfied with HD, this due to too much shuttering of the 1280×720 video, quality was good.

User Interface

On to UI. The experience was as I have read elsewhere, clean and easy to navigate. Logical with lists by; Popular movies, popular movie clips, Alphabetical, Genre and Studio.

The main player has a very clean grey on black and reminds me of the front of one of the old Sony broadcast monitors, which had pressure buttons on the front. Some of the features are worth noting, both good and not so good.

List Of Features

• Chapter points: When the user mouse’s over a pop up window appears and if you click, it plays from that part of the content or you get a spot though I have not determined if there is any methodology behind this. The pop-up windows are cute but would be better served if they were user definable for future reference/playback or for sharing with others, this does not enhance the experience in any meaningful way.
• Lower lights: very nice feature, which dims the rest of the desktop to make the player prominent, works as, advertised.
• Timer for Ads: In the upper left portion of the player window, you are informed how long until your content will resume and with a notice of limited commercial interruption, nice! Certainly a feature to allay concerns you are going to be in for the kind of commercial pummelling one gets when watching American Idol.
• Video is intended for mature audiences, both in text and with a VO: Tipper Gore would be proud.
• Details window: limited information so far but needs to be there.
• Share: Covers most of the top-level share and comment sites to reach most people in the blogosphere.
• The landing page, for Sideways as example has limited information about the cast, user feedback, etc… How cool would it have been if they had struck a deal with IMDB to spawn out to their site, or embed some of the content within the Hulu page? The irony of course is that Hulu spawns out to Amazon if you are interested in buying a film…since Amazon owns IMDB this seems like a big misstep.
• Pop-up undocked window: Good if you want to watch while multi-tasking.
• Ouch, Edited for TV and Pan Scan? Are Sideways and other titles cut down in length? “to run in the time allotted”.

Conclusions

In summary, the user experience was positive and this is still version 1.0 for all intensive purposes. I will likely use this on my pc, which I dedicated to our large screen like Netflix, which I stream to the set. 

However, most consumers do not have the sophistication to connect such devices and a simple solution would have been to work with platforms such as the SanDisk Sansa TakeTV so people can move to their large screens.

The ITV experience is getting better, an evolutionary process and Hulu gets props for what is does well, let’s see if they can lean back for a larger audience…

[Content in whole or part adapted from IPTVe and is licensed under Creative Commons, no addition derivative works may be copied from this article without prior permission from IPTVe and Web TV Wire]

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