Hulu Now Open to the Public

A site called Hulu, which has been talked about a few times over at CenterNetworks, has gone public. It has been in private, invite-only beta mode for about six months.

Hulu per day for the last 30 days.
Technorati Chart
Get your own chart!

There is a very quiet buzz about Hulu on the Internet. An old friend of mine blogged about the other day, making it sound much better than it actually seems to be. In one sentence, Jon said “I have been able to catch up on shows that I didn’t watch the first time around”. However, when I visited Hulu, I found that there isn’t much potential to catch up on episodes you missed, unless you just missed them within the last few weeks.

I visited Hulu for the first time expecting to see a huge collection of full episodes. Unfortunately, what I found was a site with a decent selection of series, but only a handful of episodes from each series. Hulu doesn’t seem to offer any episodes of new shows that you can’t currently find on the network sites (probably because Hulu is actually owned by NBC and NewsCorp – NewsCorp is the parent company of Fox Broadcasting).

It may just be me, but as long as the networks continue to offer streaming video of full episodes from their own Web sites, and as long as Hulu continues to hold only a handful of full episodes for each series, I just don’t see the point.

Anyway, you can check it out for yourself by visiting Hulu.