The Intermission

Recently, I realized that I have been neglecting to use a number of invitations to private beta sites, including:

Hulu - A joint venture between NBC and FOX to stream TV episodes online

BAAGZ - A unique combination of social networking and semantic search

Sandy - An electronic personal assistant that understands emails you send to her and sends you reminders (among other things)

Scrybe - An extremely Web 2.0 approach to calendars, but with unique features like the ability to view your calendar while offline or print a pocket calendar

So I’m making a point to try these sites and write reviews here. Today, I’m reviewing Hulu…

Initially, I’m pretty impressed with Hulu. It seems like a solid user experience paired with a nice technology for streaming video. It’s also nice to have a somewhat wide variety of videos at one site (unlike the NBC, FOX, ABC, and other video streaming sites, which are generally limited to a single network).

First, let’s examine the user experience.
You can browse videos through three methods:

• Most popular
• Divided by network/studio
• Alphabetical listing

This seems like a pretty reasonable set of options to me.

Once you select a show, you’ll see an array of large thumbnails with episode name, number, and length. Once you choose an episode, there’s a few seconds of buffering, then a 5 second ad, and then the episode begins.

The default video size is reasonable. The video controls are visible briefly, and then they hide on the sides. When you mouse over the video, you’ll see video controls on the bottom, and a variety of other controls on the left and right. You can’t scrub through the video, but you do have pretty fine control over where you jump to, and there’s only a moment of buffering before the video starts again. (For reference, I have a relatively slow broadband connection. Your mileage may vary.)

The controls on the left include Share, Embed, Details, and Feedback. Of these, Share and Embed are definitely the most interesting. Share lets you send a link to the video to a friend. But before you send the email, you can drag a couple of sliders to create a custom snippet. When your friend clicks through the email to watch the video, they’ll start out at the beginning of the snippet you created (though the whole episode will be available).

Similarly, you can embed an whole or part episode using custom snippets. I’ve embedded a video snippet below. Notice how, after the snippet plays, you can watch any or all of the episode.

Important Note: The quality of these embedded videos is much worse than the quality when you watch directly on Hulu. Too bad, because it makes them look lame.

The tools on the right side include Full Screen, Pop Out, Lower Lights, and Rate.
Full Screen provides a truly full screen experience, meaning the video extends outside your browser window to take up the entire screen.
Pop Out puts the video in a new window (although you’re limited to a small video size in that window).
Lower Lights puts a semi-transparent gray overlay over the rest of the web page, giving the appearance that it has been dimmed. (This could be much better if it was more like the Divx feature that more literally dims the screen around your video, and which is not limited to the browser window.)
Rate allows you to give the video a rating between 1 and 5 stars.

Beneath the video, and beneath the other episode thumbnails, and then beneath the related video thumbnails, they have tucked away user reviews. This is just a standard place for users to rant about what they like or don’t like. It’s sort of an expected feature for video sites, even though I feel like it ads very little value.

I did notice a couple of problems that indicate to me why it’s still in beta:

• The site is pretty good about picking up a video where you left off. Meaning, if you’re half way through Video 1, and you decide to click on a different video, but then go back to Video 1, it will pick up right where you left off. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work under certain circumstances.
• The custom video snippet feature I mentioned earlier is a little buggy. If you create multiple snippets from the same video, it doesn’t always update the <embed> code with the correct time codes.
• There’s a bit of a usability problem with the video navigation. When the video progress bar is minimized, it spans the entire width of the video, but when it’s fully visible, it only takes up about half the width of the video. So if you’re trying to navigate to a spot in the video when the bar is minimized, but then move your mouse one pixel too high, suddenly your mouse is on the mute button instead of the progress bar. It’s tough to explain, but it gets annoying quickly.

Overall, though, I definitely recommend that you sign up for the beta. It strikes me as much more well conceived than either NBC’s or FOX’s TV streaming sites. For sure, Hulu plays to a different audience than iTunes. If you like to own your TV episodes, this won’t help you. But if you’re just looking for a good streaming experience, Hulu is worth looking at.

(more…)

One of the many joys of having a digital TV recorder on my Mac (EyeTV Hybrid by Elgato) is that I can save the funniest commercials in addition to the best shows. Here’s one I like that aired during an episode of The Office. It’s from FedEx Kinkos.

Kinko’s Commercial