Hands-on with Hulu's Streaming Video Site

The new streaming video site offers free episodes of shows such as "24," "The Office," "Heroes," and "House"—along with commercials that you can't skip. The private beta for Hulu just launched; read on for my initial impressions.

First, a little background: as you may recall, NBC announced back in August that it won't renew its contract with the iTunes video store, citing Apple's inflexibility on pricing and lax DRM controls (Apple claimed that NBC simply wanted to raise prices). The bigger story is that the big TV and movie studios don't want to let Apple corner the video market as it did with music downloads (70 percent market share, anyone?), so everyone is trying out new online video strategies while the playing field is still up for grabs. NBC is looking to launch its free (but DRM'd) NBC Direct download service later this year; meanwhile, Hulu, a joint venture with Fox, is another prong in the strategy.

So, how does Hulu look? It's a pretty slick, easy-to-navigate site, featuring the most popular NBC and Fox shows, including "24," "Bones," "Bionic Woman," "House," "Heroes," "The Office," "Scrubs," "Prison Break," "30 Rock," "My Name is Earl," and "The Simpsons." (Only a handful of episodes were available for each show, though I expect more will be added before the official launch.) Also on tap are shows from subsidiary cable networks FX ("Damages," "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia") and Sci-Fi (the geek-friendly "Battlestar Galactica"). A collection of older shows is also available ("Doogie Howser," "Hill Street Blues," "Miami Vice," "The A-Team," and so on), plus a handful of movies, such as "Breaking Away," "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World," "Sideways," "Conan the Barbarian," and "Bullworth."

The streaming Hulu player is as slick as the site itself; you can stream videos straight from the Web page, or you can launch a pop-up, resizable player (a full-screen mode is also available). Mousing-over the player shows you the progress bar and gives you access to a few options: you can check out episode information, mail a link of the episode to a buddy, or—this is a new one for a network-owned video site—embed the video directly onto your Web site (you can even select a specific clip). Nice.

Video quality on Hulu varied, although I'm inclined to cut it a break since its just in private beta. Overall, video looked pretty sharp, if shy of the smooth, clean video on ABC's site (which includes HD streaming video), although some of the episodes I saw looked pretty muddy and blocky. For example, an "Office" episode from earlier this season looked terrible, but last week's episode looked fine. Meanwhile, the wide-screen "Master and Commander" was cropped to a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, and the video looked painfully muddy and blocky. That said, Hulu is still in beta, so I'm expecting video quality to improve as more shows are added.

Of course, nothing comes free—in the case of Hulu, that means non-skippable, 30-second ads. Most of the TV episodes I saw had spaces for four to five ads (not all the commercials have been added yet), while movies had closer to 10 spots.

All in all, it's an interesting experiment; I like the structure of the Hulu site and the ability to e-mail and embed clips from shows, as well as the functionality of the pop-up player. Video quality could be better, however, and the commercials are annoying, of course (but a necessary evil, I suppose).

What do you think? Willing to sit through forced commerical breaks for free online TV shows?