Hulu: All-you-can-eat TV shows, movies - and ads

After several months in private beta, Hulu-a portal to hundreds of free, streaming TV shows and scores of movies-is finally open to the public. But while you can watch and even embed clips from shows to your heart's content, you'll have to deal with ads aplenty.

I had a chance to check out Hulu (a joint venture of NBC and News Corp., the owner of Fox) last fall, while it was still in beta. The site itself doesn't look all that different now. It still boasts a clean, clear layout for easy navigation, along with a slick video player that lets you zoom in to a full-screen mode.

Now that Hulu is open to the public, however, it's stacked with way more content. The site hosts about 250 TV shows, including hits like "The Office, "30 Rock," "House," "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles," and "Heroes." It's also got a truckload of older shows, such as "The A-Team," "Adam-12," the unfortunate "Galactica 1980," "Hart to Hart," and "Remington Steele."

Also new are a slew of free movies, including some hits ("The Big Lebowski," "Dude, Where's My Car?" "Mulholland Drive," "Sideways," and "The Usual Suspects") and some misses ("All Dogs Go to Heaven 2," "Attack of the Puppet People"). For other movies-including "Alien 3," "Garden State," "Juno," and "Office Space" ("Did you see the memo?")-only clips are available.

Another cool feature is Hulu's Flash-powered HD "gallery," which for now offers about 20-odd movie trailers. The HD video quality (at 720p) is excellent-clips load quickly with little in the way of pixilation or other obvious artifacts. ABC streams full HD episodes of "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives," but its streams are a little touch-and-go, especially for those with so-so bandwidth.

Meanwhile, the standard TV and movie streams look OK, if not great. TV streams look a bit pixilated, but the video itself looks smooth enough, with a minimum of stuttering. Movie quality on Hulu is pretty variable-some of the movies I saw were in their original aspect ratios, some were panned-and-scanned, others were actually windowboxed (that is, big black bars surrounding the video). That said, all the films-even the R-rated ones-are uncut.

As before, everything is free, and you can even edit clips from the show and embed them into your own website-that way, you get the video, and Hulu gets credit (and presumably, revenue) for the traffic.

Of course, there's a catch: non-skippable ads.

For TV shows, you'll have to deal with four to five commercial interruptions for an hour-long episode, or seven-plus commercials for a two-hour movie. (Clips also begin with a pre-roll ad.) The ads themselves are only about 15 seconds each, and for now there's only one ad per commercial break. (In some cases, you won't see an ad at all.)

That said, I'm sure those commercial breaks will start filling up. And indeed, from everything I'm hearing, advertisers are lining up to buy spots on sites like Hulu.

While I would rather pay a couple bucks for a commercial-free TV episode (or more for a commercial-free movie rental), it sounds like free, ad-supported TV and movies may well be the wave of the future. Guess we'd better get used to the idea.

Let's also keep in mind that Hulu isn't the first site to offer free TV episodes over the Web. Other networks have streamed shows online for months now. Indeed, some of the bigger players-notably ABC and CBS-haven't signed on with Hulu.

What would I like to see from ad-supported video sites like Hulu? A more complete video library, for one, since most of the TV series listed only have streams for a handful of recent episodes (on purpose, apparently, to avoid "cannibalizing" DVD sales).

Also, why not allow downloads to portable media players? Services like the new NBC Direct already allow for PC-only downloads, but nobody is offering free, ad-supported downloads for iPods or other portable players.

Anyway, check out Hulu and report back with your thoughts. Like what you see? Can you live with the ads? What's missing?