Do you Hulu?

A few months ago, a new service was released to a limited selection of beta testers (including me). The service is called "Hulu" and allows you to watch your favorite shows online, on demand, anytime your heart desires. Now, this has been heard of before. Going on to NBC's site and watching a missed episode of Heroes or The Office is something I'm sure millions of people have done, including you.

Now, as is the case with Hulu, you can watch dozens of networks' shows that have signed on with the service. A few "local" stations have joined, including FOX, NBC, and WB, even though WB has only one show available. But other than the stations that are picked up with your bunny ears, there's a good handful of cable stations including Bravo, FOX Reality, Sci Fi, FX, and Oxygen.

The site itself is pretty simple, showing links for TV and Movies, the latter of the two we'll get to later. Below that is popular episodes and clips (note that not all shows have full episodes) and a search bar.

When you choose a show, you go to a pretty straight-forward window. The video is widescreen and pretty decent-looking quality, but with my rather slow internet connection and 3 other tabs open, ran extremely choppy and kept stopping periodically. Before starting, a message came up noting that there are limited commercial interruptions. This is one thing that is, as far as I know, from watching it on another network's site. Usually, on those sites, you have to watch an un-skippable commercial that lasts about 15 or 10 seconds.

After closing 2 of the tabs and quitting Flash MX, iMovie, Microsoft Word, and iTunes that were all in the background, the video ran with less stopping, but still choppy. I put it in full screen and it looked very pixelated, but still wasn't as bad as watching, say, a Youtube video in full screen. A rather interesting and welcomed feature when watching it in a window, is that you can "turn off the lights" which makes everything around the video darker, and is much easier on the eyes.

Above the video is some basic info about it, and below is lists of clips, episodes, and comments. It seems like comments should be a little higher up on the page, considering they're at the extreme bottom below several lists of videos. This could also be a good choice, though, if the same Youtube crowd shows up on Hulu to flame their day away.

Another extremely welcomed feature, as mentioned before, are movies. There's a good amount of movies to be watched (I counted 74), including popular titles such as The Big Lebowski, Sideways, October Sky, and Ice Age, and Me, Myself & Irene. I watched the first few minutes of October Sky and it looked and sounded pretty good. As with the case of TV shows, there's commercials in about 15-20 minute intervals, if not more.

Some final thoughts: Hulu is often ridden with ads; even a Chili's ad popped up in the middle of October Sky, even though you could get rid of it. And don't think that you can skip through commercials. If you skip through one, a 10-20 second ad is played, just as if it would have if you watched it.
Video quality is pretty decent, and I'm sure it's even better the faster connection you have. The Office was running pretty choppy, but the October Sky ran smoothly, so it could depend on if you reload the video or different ways you play with it to make it work.
It's a pretty good service and I'd say that I would use it, especially to see a missed episode or a movie I haven't seen in awhile for free.

It may even replace your TV in a few years, if not another service or the network's sites combined.

So, my question is, do you Hulu? Let me hear it in the comments, and maybe even your thoughts on the service and what experience you had.