My first few days of Christmas break (specifically December 17th) were made that much better when I received my invite to Hulu, the online TV and video on demand service with NBC and FOX shows. Before Hulu, I’ve used a few other services. On March 2nd, I landed an invite to Joost‘s then private beta and have been using ABC’s and NBC’s online TV services as well. Summaries of what I’ve tried are below but for a more comprehensive list, try Wikipedia.
Online TV Services
- Hulu has a clean and easy to navigate website. It also has fairly high resolution videos with a clean player that lets you share the videos anywhere you want (including other websites) and works on Linux. Commercials have not been able to work on Linux (I’m not complaining) but full screen view hasn’t worked as well.
- NBC makes it extremely hard to find where the full-length shows are available but works well on Linux. Resolution is adequate and commercials are totally manageable.
- ABC is also extremely hard to locate the full shows. It used to work on Linux but ABC has moved to some new player technology, which to me looks like flash, that does not work with Linux. The player itself checks the browsing agent and denies access if not on Windows or Mac OS X. I have a feeling it would simply work on Linux if they let it but ABC has ignored my inquiries on the matter.
- Joost sucks. The player is not web based, doesn’t use native graphics widgets, and is extremely bloated. The content is extremely hard and tedious to navigate and the last time I checked, none of the content was worth while. I’ve had a review written about Joost for a while but haven’t posted it because I felt like Joost wasn’t even worth talking about.
- Other on-demand video sites exist which simply link to TV and movie content that has been illegally posted on sites like YouTube. The quality of these sites are crappy at best and the links tend to go down faster than they come up. Not worth perusing in my opinion.
The good news is that, unlike record labels, TV broadcasting companies are trying their best to use the most preferred channels for content. I’ve been TV free for four years now, not because I don’t have my favorite shows, but because I hate that the content is streaming instead of on-demand. I will gladly watch commercials as long as I can watch shows online.
Getting into Hulu Private Beta
GigaOM has managed to get their users a link to be fast-tracked into Hulu private beta. Unfortunately right now it looks like invites are closed.
- None Found