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Hulu went public today, offering free television shows streamed courtesy the major networks. The quality is decent, the interface is actually pretty slick and aside from some quirks (like removing episodes for some shows after a few weeks) it’s a great start on a single site to visit to watch all of your television online. Hulu’s been in private beta for ages, and it’s been steadily building a buzz for mostly the right reasons (and a few reasons that were just plain silly).
While the tv-viewing capacity of the site’s been widely touted, I was pleasantly surprised to by their “movies” section. Some of the fare is straight-to-video dretch, but amongst the few films offered are some enduring gems like Mulholland Drive, Requiem for a Dream, The Jerk and ¡Three Amigos! When I tried watching Sideways, I was hit with a warning that the film was modified to “fit this screen, to run in the time allotted and edited for content.” In that case, the film was apparently the version that airs 3p on rainy Sunday. Fullscreen, poorly compressed and awkwardly overdubbed it was less than stellar. But Titan AE looked pretty good with their hi-res version, in letterbox and played with no pre-buffer time. Of course, their hi-res version was only 480p which hardly counts as hi-res to me, but it’s a pretty remarkable achievement and far better than any other free streaming movie options around.
It’s still not as compelling as option as stage6 was, and the limited selection will be a deal breaker for many. But the iTunes store started with a limited selection and it’s doing alright, from what I hear.

Tags: Hulu, online tv, online video, titan ae

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 3:45 am and is filed under Very Good. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.