Last night my Hulu.com beta invite arrived. Hulu is a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp’s online video. Immediately I logged in and created a new password and started poking around. You mean I can use Hulu to legally watch full episodes of shows like The Simpsons? Right on!

As I write this post, I’m watching Treehouse of Horror XVIII from this year’s season, something I can’t do anywhere else online (legally). Offline we don’t have cable, satellite or even an over the air antenna setup, so even the free channels aren’t an option in our household. For the last 500+ days, our only form of television has been through DVDs purchased of seasons. We just finished watching the first seasons of Benson and Silver Spoons, for example.

The two major problems with Joost I have is that the content doesn’t appeal to me and it’s P2P based. I’ve tried a couple different times to get into Joost but it’s like watching most of the channels on TV: there’s a lot of channels but very little of interest to me. Maybe some others reading love all the Joost content and can tell me what I’m missing? Shortly after launching Joost I’m already ready to shut it down.

Not the case for Hulu where I could instantly scan the available choices and start watching.

Hulu offers professional content from: Bravo, E! Entertainment, FOX, IGN, NBC Universal, Sci Fi, FX, Sundance Channel, Sony, USA, Universal Pictures, Comedy Time, MGM, Fight Networks, Ford Models, Fuel TV, G4, GameSpot, Golf Channel, Movieola, WWE, National Geographic, Oxygen, Speed Channel, TVG, TV.com, TV Guide, Versus, X17, LX.TV, Rehearsals, Reveille, Style Network and TVG Horse Racing.

This includes some of our newer favorite shows like: 24, Cops, Las Vegas, Prison Break, My Name is Earl and The Simpsons as well as some classics like The A-Team, Night Gallery and WKRP in Cincinatti. Also there are some new shows we haven’t seen like: Bionic Woman. Some of the shows listed are only clips like Saturday Night Live, which is kind of lame.

The first thing I tried to do was run Hulu on the PS3 through our 1080p HDTV. No dice in the Playstation browser, so my next test will be to see if I can pipe the Hulu video experience through the Xbox 360 and Vista version of Media Center. I’d much prefer to watch this on the TV, even if it’s still in a browser type setup.

Confined by the browser (F11 still doesn’t cut it)
One strength Joost has over Hulu is not being confined to the browser. If there’s a workaround for this, please let me know in the comments. TV and movies are best enjoyed on a television or decent-sized monitor, not in a browser.

I know the F11 trick in Firefox, but it still leaves remnants of the browser on screen. When you go full screen through Hulu you get large black blocky space around the frame, not truly stretched full screen video as shown in the video screenshot to the right below. In Joost you can get a better true full screen experience than Hulu.

Hulu options available include: a small popout window, full screen (with browser remnants), lower lights which dims frame colors around the viewing area and the ability to rate the shows from 1-5 stars. I’d trade all these options for a single fully stretched, high quality picture. Let me pay a few bucks and get HD and I’ll be reaching for my wallet.

With the new shows you can watch the four most recent episodes which is a bit of a bummer if you’re just now getting invited and the episodes start at #3 or #4. With WKRP in Cincinatti the entire first season was available. Wow, that’s quite a value considering we paid $20 for the DVD! Night Gallery, however only had four episodes from the first season, so not every series is complete. Still, there’s enough content to watch at Hulu to keep one busy for weeks, if not months.

The quality of the video is merely OK. It’s equal to or better than the quality of other TV in browser implementations but it’s not DVD-quality and a far cry from HD quality. When you resize the windows, the video will resize. At full screen you’ll see some pixelation and artifacts.

No, not commercial free like DVDs
At Hulu you will have to endure 30 second commercial breaks that you can’t fast forward through, but these seem less intrusive than commercials on television. In the Simpsons episode I counted three 30 second commercial breaks. No problem.

Summary and grade
With the wide variety and quality content offered through Hulu for free (there are commercials, again), this is easily my favorite TV video site available on the web. Sadly, it’s not available outside the United States at this time but according to a post on the Hulu blog:

Today, the service is a U.S. service only. That said, our intention is to make Hulu’s growing content lineup available worldwide. Given that this requires clearing the rights for each show or film in each specific geography, it will take time. In no uncertain terms, the Hulu team is committed to making great programming available across the globe. I’ve been very encouraged by how many content providers have already been working along these lines so that their programs can be available over the internet to a much larger, global audience.

Hulu doesn’t really compare to user-generated sites like YouTube. You can’t upload your own videos to Hulu and you are kind of an island as far as an individual user (no social features that I can see yet), but you can embed clips from your favorite shows in your site/blog like say Opera Man from Saturday Night Live:

All in all, I’m very impressed and surprised by how much I liked Hulu on a first look. We’ll be spending a good amount of time at Hulu over the next few weeks. If/when they expand this to a global audience and add some more features like videoblogs and user-created content, work on higher quality (yes, even it’s for a fee), they’ll have a serious competitor in the online video sector. They already do with the content alone. Grade: B

• 100+ days without TV and loving it
• FCC looking out for the little guys in cable with proposed restrictions
• Finding local TV channel lineups on the web
• Update on (maybe) ditching cable for satellite
• Life after TV = IPTV?
• USDTV to Launch Low-Cost Wireless TV Service