Hulu, the future of television

If you haven’t applied for a login to hulu.com’s beta, go do it now! Hulu is a relatively high quality streaming television solution from NBC, allowing you to catch up on old series, old and new episodes of current shows, and clips from a wide range of content providers. Free with minimal advertising, Hulu allows you to watch copyrighted content without the hassle of P2P. In my case, Bit Torrent isn’t much of a hassle, but its great if you’re not sure what you’re looking for. What I really love is that they made older content available. A lot of content is going unused these days, and could result in a lot more people forming a relationship with a studio when they discover older series on Hulu that until now were languishing on DVD if they were lucky.

I like the interface, and it works really well on a modest machine. NBC is taking the first step towards getting viewers like me back into the fold. I shouldn’t have to pay for Tivo at all to timeshift my programming. Let me stream it to my media center PC on demand. I don’t want to steal anything, and giving me the choice to timeshift this programming is just what I need to come back to the light…far away from the pirate scene.

I can only hope that they’ll keep the advertising at a minimum, as they have. People of my generation are not really listening anyways.