Ok, so I checked out the public version of Hulu last night and was a little disappointed with the layout. The player is framed (top and bottom) by very white areas. The one on top has information for the video that you're waching and the one down below has additional episodes as well as a YouTube-esque comments area. It's really weird because the player is very black. It makes for a very claustrophobic feel. There's a "pop out" feature that will launch the video in its own window, but a) it's a lame extra step and b) the original player keeps going so you're trying to launch two of the same video running out of time with each other. You can go full-screen but the resolution isn't as good.
As far as content is concerned, I'm undecided. I was watching a few episodes of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" and was loving the third season episodes I hadn't seen yet. The weird part is that they had season 3 (most recent) and season 1. No season 2. I understand that they can't have every episode of every show. I mean, are they going to have 33 years of 90-minute SNL episodes? Of course not. Why they would leave out a season of a series with a total run of 32 half-hour episodes is a little beyond me. Commercials are a winner, though. Each episode I watched had a 15-second lead-in commercial and 2 more 15-second commericals within the episode. 45 seconds of commercials as opposed to around 8 minutes? Awesome!
I'm going to check out a movie tonight (but not "The Big Lebowski" because I've seen it an obscene amount of times) and see how it goes. I wouldn't mind a block of commericals in front of the flick, but would be pretty annoyed by commercial breaks during the movie. Also, I'm curious about censorship. "It's Always Sunny..." made me confirm that I was over 17 (and in 1-up over YouTube it remembered my age when I tried to watch another TV-MA episode) so I wonder if that same confirmation would allow for un-censored movies. Another question I need to try and answer is "If I'm not old enough, can I see the 'TV version' of the movie?" If the answer is "yes," that'd be kind of awesome, as opposed to a "Sorry, you're too young" message.
Overall, I'm pleased, so far, with Hulu. It offeres what it said it would, which is a legal venue to watch copyrighted video material from major networks and studios. The only major flaw I see is in the style, which I think will probably be dealt with once they're a little more "broken in."
I'll update tonight or tomorrow morning (remember, I'm a Pacific Time kind of guy) and let you know how movies worked out.
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