Hulu.com today expanded their userbase by sending out a bunch of invites to those who signed up for beta, which this time included me. Generally it’s pretty hard to get excited about visiting media company sites due to small video size and a bunch of DRM they put in (such as displaying video only if you use RealPlayer 9 on Windows XP Service Pack 2), but Hulu.com presently surprises – the videos work well, the site is easy to browse, the quality of videos is quite nice, and they still look reasonable when expanded fullscreen on a 24″ monitor.
The list of available network shows is available here. I watched a few episodes of Family Guy, American Dad, and Simpsons. They do not have a comprehensive collection of all the episodes, but they do have the latest stuff (including episodes that were on TV this past Sunday), and they seem to be filling up their content starting from Season 1. The site is easy to browse, has direct URLs to each episode ( such as http://www.hulu.com/watch/2991/keeping-up-with-the-kardashians-helping-out). The ads are inserted on a regular schedule – before and after the episode, as well as 2 insertions for a 30 minute episode. The commercials I got were those annoying eSurance.com ads, which I tolerate on TV and can tolerate online. All the videos are pausable and viewable later.
I don’t see setting the site up to be my homepage, but as far as number of episodes of good network shows, the quality and selection is generally better than any other video sharing site out there.
