Hulu looks to have smoothed out some of the bumps in the road in its current invitation-only beta version. They continue adding new content — having tripled the size of their library since opening last October — and they’ve improved their site navigation options, expanded their distribution into additional online sites, and have dialed in on managing capacity and demand.
A joint venture of NBC Universal [owners of Bravo, USA Network, Sci-Fi, A&E, Sundance Channel, Oxygen] and News Corp [think Fox, FX, Speed, FUEL TV, National Geographic Channel, and The History Channel] Hulu offers free video-on-demand content: episodes of current shows, past seasons, archive series, and a limited selection of films. Image quality is crisp within the in-screen viewer, although at full screen there’s noticeable degradation. [Limited HD content is available for those with sufficient bandwidth and hardware.]
Hulu seems to be processing invites and adding new users in waves: a good thing, since their level of service was a bit, er, inconsistent during the early fast-growth months. If your request for a beta invite is placed on hold, check out Justin Goldberg’s peek inside the list of available private beta invites via Google. While supplies last.
Even though we’re in this age of World Wide Web, much of Hulu’s content distribution is limited to within the United States. If you’re outside of the US, you can reclaim your geographic anonymity with Hotspot Shield. [Thanks for this tip goes out to Matt Schlicht at OpenHulu]
Since there’s almost always more than one way to do it online, you don’t need to access Hulu directly to see the shows. Hulu has partnered with AOL, Comcast, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo as additional distribution venues; MySpace and Veoh are already providing some content. And OpenHulu may be worth checking out. Matt has painstakingly embedded all of Hulu’s content in an open-access site — no invitation or log-in required. Since Hulu’s branding and advertising are still intact within each video, the site seems to be in compliance with their terms of use, so OpenHulu is legit and above-board. That said, the user interface, however, is a poor substitute for the real thing.
All in all, a decent amount of buzz for a site that’s still in development. And we fully expect to see more in the coming months, as Hulu and others move to bring more shows to a wider online audience.
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