Competitor to YouTube
I great new competitor to youtube has hit the market. The name, hulu.com. I heard about hulu earlier this week and have been testing it out in different locations with different internet speeds. Let me just say, this site is AWESOME!!! Best of all, every thing is FREE (my favorite word). Fox and NBC are the main contributors. This explains why NBC pulled all their material from youtube a few months ago. You can get full episodes of shows, watch movies, or watch specific clips. The resolution is great and you can move to full screen without getting a degrading of picture quality.
The catch is that there are ads inserted into the viewing at specific time intervals. Most of the ads are 15 seconds with a few at 30 seconds. When watching a two hour movie I saw seven ads, two being the 30 second variety, for a total of 3 minutes 30 seconds of ads. That is not bad when you consider the alternative of paying for a movie. Now this is not going to replace Netflix right away since the number of movies available are quite limited right now, but this may be a way to reduce your netflix membership to less movies at one time. My hope is that over time this will replace the need or want (depending on the person) for Tivo or Netflix.
March 17th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
can’t really call hulu a competitor. Don’t get me wrong its a great site, I’ve been using it since beta testing. Hulu is all about produced content. Youtube is user generated content. Those channels were never going to work. Now if Hulu can offer downloaded content, bye bye p2p movies. Definitely check out hulu and make sure the big tv companies can make some money on those ads. Many of the shows and movies don’t serve ads as they haven’t filled all the space yet. One caveat, sometimes you can’t get entire seasons. Arrested Development puts up partial seasons.