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"Despite what some other pundits are saying, Hulu isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread. I must say, the system exceeded my expectations in terms of the technology, open-ness and video selection, but keep in mind I had really, really low expectations. I still cling to my position that NBC's withdrawal from other sites like YouTube and iTunes mean that Hulu is a step backwards instead of forward. Still, this is more about an early look at the site based on its merits alone.\nThe first thing I noticed about the site were not the splashy graphics, or the full downloads of episodes - it was the error screens.  It took me around six or seven minutes to get logged into the site. I imagine the site is getting hit pretty hard today, and it is still in private beta, but there is very little more frustrating than seeing the following screen off and on for  the better part of a half hour while you're trying to get a review done:\n\nI wouldn't even mention it, except there were a few instances when I'd be watching a video, and five or so minutes in, the site would spit me out to the login screen, and then I'd get a \"Gateway Timeout\" when I'd try to re-log in. The problem was persistant across multiple machines, and multiple connections tested (AT&amp;T, Suddenlink Cable and Insight Cable were all tested).\nAnother interesting quirk: when we attempted to watch the videos from a connection in Peoria, IL (Insight Cable), they worked momentarily, then gave the error: \"Video not available in your country or region.\"\n\nHowever, after much finagling, I was able to get it to work fairly consistently on my 1.7 GHZ barebones machine on $10 AT&amp;T DSL. Amazingly, the videos played without many pre-buffering issues (a problem quite consistent to NBC.com's player on many of my lower-grade machines). I watched an entire episode of Scrubs, and towards the end I began playing with some of the buttons that are around the edges.\n\nSeveral of the features are interesting. There's the old standby \"Share This\" icon, allowing you to email clips to friends, the \"Embed\" button (which only works on fairly old episodes), and several buttons pertaining to how you view the clip (fullscreen, low light, etc).  The compression seems to be a notch above most other embedded video player systems, and full episodes buffer well, even on low-grade systems like mine. The site seems to be set up for long viewing periods, with settings for full screen and low light situations, although in full screen mode, frame-rate drops significantly.\nThere were two redeeming features of the whole site that I could find through all my testing:\n(1) Embedding custom clips: a neat little twist on embedding a clip was that yes, on some episodes, you could embed the full show, but you could also manually select timestamp to embed just a portion of the full clip.\n(2) Battlestar Galactica: nothing much should need to be said. Unfortunately, only about five episodes currently exist on the site, and it is one of the few shows allowing full episode embeds. If they fill out this section, I must admit it would keep me coming back to the site (or to a site on which the episodes were embedded).\n\nHere's the questions on everyone's mind:\nIs the service cool?Yeah, I'd say it's barely cool.  I mean, it's a well designed website, the videos are mostly pretty cool, and of course they're well produced. There are no community features, though, and with the inability to embed recently released shows, virility will be highly limited.\nCool enough to beat YouTube?Hands down, no. One of the great draws of YouTube and other embedded video sites is that they have a wide range of content on them.  Statistics show that of the twelve or so people left in America that still buy a newspaper, one the first sections they turn to is the Society section, so they can see if they've been caught on camera with their high society friends.  YouTube plays to this, amongst other things.  It's a clearinghouse for all sorts of entertainment, not just network produced entertainment.  Hulu will have some draw long term, but it will never become a YouTube in terms of traffic and dominance.\nWas it worth it for NBC to remove their content from YouTube and iTunes?Absolutely not.  As I've stated before, they've significantly limited their distribution, and therefore the advertising inventory and marketing footprint online. There are, without a doubt, less people who will view NBC's content as a result of them pulling it from iTunes and YouTube. This means less money in advertising from online views, less purchases of individual episodes and season passes, and ultimately less profit.  In effect, they've looked at everything successful about new media and done the opposite.\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2007/10/29/hulu-review/>