Word: huluing
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Enter the Death Star, otherwise known as Hulu hulu.com) When NBC Universal and News Corp. announced last year that they were jointly starting their own YouTube knockoff, the guffaws were loud and long: everybody who's ever seen a made-for-TV movie knows that the scrappy underdog always beats the corporate Goliath. But oddly enough, Hulu, which came out of beta in March, is a gorgeous piece of interface design laid over a technically very sweet video player. The offerings are eclectic but compelling: a handful of current shows (The Office, The Simpsons, 30 Rock), a larger handful...
...Hulu does have huge gaps. You can fill in those gaps two ways. One is with money: Apple's pay-per-download iTunes store has a wider selection of TV shows and movies than Hulu, as does Amazon's Unbox service. Two is with your immortal soul: you can download all this stuff for free, illegally, via LimeWire, BitTorrent and lots of other file-sharing systems...
Launching on Wednesday at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Time, Hulu (the name is derived from the Mandarin word for gourd) streams current episodes of dozens of network TV series, including hits like House, The Simpsons and Late Night With Conan O'Brien. It also has episodes from 250 classic series, such as Miami Vice and The Dick Van Dyke Show, and 100 full-length feature films including The Big Lebowski and Some Like It Hot. (Hulu currently offers shows from NBC and Fox; WB shows will be added in the next few months.) You'll also find thousands of short...
...watch your show with less than half the number of ads you would normally see. For example, when I went to Fox.com to watch a recent episode of The Simpsons, I had to suffer through a minute of commercials before I got to see the show. On Hulu, while I had to update my copy of Macromedia Flash, there were less than 20 seconds of ads in the first 8 minutes. And unlike digital video recorders such as TiVo, which cost hundreds of dollars and require time to set up and schedule recordings, Hulu has no setup and no cost...
...quibbles: Hulu claims that new episodes will be available on its site by 6 a.m. Eastern Time the day after they air on TV. But when I tested the site two days before it came out of beta, the most recent episodes of Family Guy and The Simpsons were more than a week old. Hopefully this is a startup glitch that the site will work out soon. Secondly, Hulu needs to make these videos available in a mobile format, so viewers can download them to iPods and cell phones. But other than that, Hulu is a groundbreaking website that doesn...