The Future of Television: Hulu

When you think of online television your first thought is probably something like YouTube. But now there is another online site that has some of your favorite shows on it. It's called Hulu, and it's completely free.

What is it?

As stated above, Hulu is a website where you can find some of your favorite shows online for free. You do have to create an account, but after that you can watch whatever you want. Choose from either television shows or movies.

How can this be legal and free? Simple. Like a normal television show, you will view a commercial every fifteen minutes or so into your programming. The commercials are not intrusive or anything like that, and you can always just ignore them.

Selection -

As for the selection, it's not too bad. You definitely will not find every television show or movie that was ever made, but you will discover a few of your favorites. Some examples are The Simpsons, House, Battlestar Galactica, and many more. You can find movies like Ice Age on Hulu as well.

Website Navigation -

Getting lost on this website would be a difficult task because everything is layed out well and easy to use. Links are where they should be and nothing is difficult to find. And so far no glitches.

Quality -

As for the quality, it's not bad. You can select to watch your shows at a small size or full screen. The smaller size is sharper and clearer than the full screen mode but only a little. If you choose to watch the video at a small size then you can select the dim light feature to shadow out the text that surrounds the video.

Full screen mode is surprisingly clear, with just a hint of blurriness in the video. The video is also occasionally jerky, but it's not that bad. Since Hulu is free and relatively new, you can cut them a little slack. The quality and selection is bound to improve in the future.

Embedding the Video -

Like YouTube, Hulu allows you to embed the video directly onto your website. This gives you additional content for your website, and it creates more traffic for Hulu. Everybody wins.

While Hulu does not have as much content on it as your cable box, it is a convenient way to watch some shows if you're at the office or something. And who knows what the future holds for this company. Maybe one day cable will really be replaced by online television.