(All I think about is The Industry these. I’m sorry I’ve got none of the personal dirt you’ve come to expect from me. I’m considering a format change.)
I got bored this weekend and ended up watching a lot of shows on Hulu.
What is Hulu? It’s News Corp. (Fox) and NBC Universal’s attempt at a video-on-demand site, built so they can make money and so people will maybe stop illegally uploading TV shows to YouTube. It’s a greed thing, basically.
But I kinda love it. The site’s easy to navigate, there’s quite a bit of content (OPENhulu has an incomplete list, but it’ll give you an idea), the ads are unobtrusive and the video player has lots of options (pop the video into a separate window, make it full screen, embed a customized clip somewhere else, etc.). Will it stop people from uploading copyrighted videos to YouTube? Hardly. But will it make money? Sure.
So I’ve decided it’s my duty as a media type, TV freak and beta tester to report on my findings.
Reasons I love Hulu:
I’ve got a wide range of options. Current shows like Heroes and Friday Night Lights, shows from my childhood like Doogie Howser and Buffy, shows that Real Growups reminisce about like WKRP, and a few random movies like The Jerk thrown in.
You can create a custom clip by setting the in and out points of the video. Want to post a single scene to your blog? Easily done. (I dream of the day CBS gets in on this so I can make clips of favorite Barneyisms from How I Met Your Mother.)
The videos play smoothly, with shorter commercial interruptions than any of the network’s other video players. I only saw it buffer once in MANY hours of playback (this is how I pass time while doing laundry), and that was during peak traffic, I think. One video took a few extra seconds to load, but that may have been because it was fetching a “for mature audiences only” pre-roll. (Who knew It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia wasn’t for children?)
It’s easy to find what you’re looking for. I haven’t used the search because it’s so easy to browse to the exact video I want.
The site layout is clean. It’s getting slightly more cluttered with time as they integrate the advertising (pretty sure that wasn’t there earlier), but it’s far less ugly/busy/confusing than, say, NBC.com’s video pages. Maybe that’s because they’re trying for a Web 2.0 look. I’m sure it won’t last.
You can review each episode/clip. If you’re into that. Not sure if user reviews impact the “most popular” listings.
Things that suck about Hulu:
They’re still holding back content. They’ve got the first season of Buffy, but where’s the rest of the series? Maybe I haven’t gotten my fill of human-on-vampire makeout sessions.
New episodes don’t show up as quickly as they should. Friday’s episode of Friday Night Lights was on NBC’s site on Saturday morning. Why doesn’t Hulu have it yet? Where is Wednesday’s episode of Project Runway? They’ll both be there eventually, but by the time they turn up, I may have resorted to piracy to get my fix. You can’t keep a TV addict waiting, NBC.
It’s not available internationally (yet). I know there’s lots of legal whatever that has to be done first, but…come on, this is the internet. Open it up.
The “related videos” make no freaking sense. Watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and they suggest Firefly. Huh? Watch Heroes and they suggest Family Guy. Hmm. Maybe they’re related by…also being on Hulu? I often play the videos in the popout window, and if they’d just link to the next episode in the series, I could keep watching (increasing the number of ads I see and boosting that valuable time-spent-on-site statistic).
So that’s more good things than bad things, and all the bad things are fixable. In a time when TV is as threatened as we newspaper people are…
…it’s nice to see TV companies making a right step in the web direction. Hulu, I’ve got high expectations. Keep up the surprisingly good work.
Congratulations to Al Tompkins for accepting that his column is actually a blog, and finally treating it as such. It drives me crazy that Poynter keeps these great “columns” stuck on bizarro software instead of letting them fully flourish on software with fully-integrated comments, trackbacks, (better?) archive navigation, etc.
My excuse is that at work they expect me to be up-to-date on all the latest web bullshit. And if I tell them it’s complete bullshit, they usually believe me.
But the more time I spend evaluating trendy new Web 2.0 shops, the more their shiny colors start to seep into my brain. And suddenly I’m a Twitter user. I’ve become one of them, one of the new media douchebags.
My solution is to stay as far away from my computer as I can during the weekends. And forty eight hours without email and IM is a beautiful thing. (Facebook updates on my cell phone don’t count.)
When you’re 16 years old and angsty, start a community website where you can vent your angst.
Wait for other kids to join in on the venting.
When the organization you’re all complaining about wants your ear, do your best impression of a mature grownup.
Wait.
When that organization you’ve been mocking discovers it has a need for the niche expertise you’ve cultivated over the past seven years, run to the nearest post office and apply for an expedited passport.
Ron Sylvester is our main video guy, and I’m lucky to get to sit right next to him at work. He’s come a long way since his first video last December. I spent a couple years in college teaching kids my age how to do this stuff, and I’m a bit in awe of how quickly and enthusiastically Ron has developed his skills. If the 19-year-olds I taught were this excited to learn new skills, I’d have a lot more faith in the future of mainstream media.
I’m on a zillion mailing lists for various aspects of online journalism (mostly from a newspaper viewpoint). All of us newspapers are tearing our hair out trying to figure out how to do this whole convergence thing. We’re banging our heads against the wall because it’s hard to learn to do video (or Flash or databases, etc.) and teach our collegues to do the same, and our early attempts never get many page views, and then we’re worried that maybe we shouldn’t waste our time if our viewers aren’t interested in our videos.
I’m the middleman in all of this. I don’t shoot the video, I don’t edit it. I play armchair director when Ron calls me over to assess his latest work before he exports it. Then I upload it. Then someone else watches and obsesses and analyzes the traffic it gets. So I can’t claim much credit for any of it. (I made the watermark, though! And the chyron templates, although I’m loving them less as time passes.)
It’s going to be a little while before we’ve got the kind of video offerings that will genuinely drive traffic, but and it’ll be nice to look back in another year at the frustrations we put ourselves through to get such amateur little videos online. But right now? It’s pretty fun to throw things at the wall and watch to see what sticks. It’s even more fun when something actually sticks.
