Posted on 14 March 2008, at 12:27 am, by Christopher Spera
There’s been a lot of buzz lately around something called Hulu. Until recently, I had no idea what it was. I saw a couple of articles here and there on the Internet, but nothing really told me what it was…and I wasn’t sure why…just that it would be really cool. Then I decided to click on one of the document links to hulu.com. That’s when I was blown away.
I am a huge fan of nostalgia TV. I am not so crazy about The Love Boat and Fantasy Island…that’s where old, really BAD 70’s TV stars when to try to revive their careers during the 1980’s. In many cases, their career’s heartbeat would blip a couple more times, but that was it. If you got relegated to repeats on either, you were done.
Anyway, until recently, if you wanted to watch any nostalgic TV, you were stuck with Nick at Night or TVLand or some other channel like that. Not any more! Now you can go to the internet to get your Nostalgia TV fix with Hulu!
Hulu is a service that reruns really old TV shows and some newer, cool movies. You can watch TV shows like Nanny and the Professor (I had such a crush on Juliet Mills as a kid…), or Johnny Soko and his Giant Robot (this and Ultraman were a staple for me).
I was sitting in bed with my wife, showing her some of the shows you can watch, and its really kinda cool. The video comes across with limited commercial breaks (yes, there’s some advertising to pay for all the content); and did really well via 802.11g wireless. I was really kinda impressed.
The service is free, the content is free for personal use, and it really kinda took me back. There’s a lot of memories for me in some of these shows… Its going to be fun going back through them and reliving memories while I watch them.
You can view all of the Hulu content at hulu.com.
March 14th, 2008 at 4:58 am
Definitely the wave of the future. I looked at this for a while under beta - it would be nice if they’d offer a way to take the shows mobile.
In the meantime my MOM emailed me a few months ago that I just had to “WATCH MOVIES” online. That she and the family had newly discovered the link through Google (Google the words in quotes). Too bad it’s not legal.
March 14th, 2008 at 5:46 am
Been using Hulu in beta for awhile now. It’s good to catch up on the new Simpsons and Family Guy episodes that I’ve missed from Sunday nights. The 30 second commercials are non-instrusive but can get repetitive if you watch several episodes in a row.
A few months ago they had tons of older episodes but they’ve since pulled them. The amount of content that they’ve added since going public is nice.
March 14th, 2008 at 7:52 am
Meh. I have a DVR. Don’t need hulu. Besides….Hulu and others have DRM and I really detest it now that I have left iTunes….the stuff I bought on iTMS is not watchable on Linux or in anything else other than iTunes. That sucks. I am a big fan of Amazon MP3 now.
March 14th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Amazon is excellent for audio-only content, but their Windows/TIVO only solution for video is somewhat lacking. They’ve got a LONG way to go on the video side of the house.
March 15th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
I Hulu and I love it!