Hey, I’m sorry if I called you The Name but this particular occasion calls for it. Oh, and that clip has nothing to do with this post. It’s from 40 Year Old Virgin and I think it’s funny.

I simply must inform you why Hulu is a top supplier of crack. First of all, let me clear up what type of mental crack we’re talking about. Basically, Hulu takes TV and movie content, some really recent, some old but classic, and lets you watch it free online, in a streamed Flash format.

This is cool for many of us who
…work on the web and find ourselves bored out of our skulls while we, say, submit links to directories…
…… or do other types of cut and paste functions for hours,
… or wait for someone to come back from IM,
…….. or work swing shift and need time-shifting resources for TV,
… or gave up TVs to have fancier computers or laptops…
… or are waiting, bored, with our laptops, in a location that has a wireless connection, etc.

So, back to why this particular brand of crack is amusing:

1- Three full seasons of Arrested Development on Demand.
2- Two seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on Demand.
3- Lots of other tv shows and movies with high replay value that you can watch when you’re bored, or are online waiting for something to finish or someone to show up.
4- Customizable, embeddable clips of those shows.
5- Alternate versions of shows that are available online but work with more browsers or aren’t as buggy as the version on the network’s site.

As I did in my post about It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I wanted to embed a clip from the show that wasn’t in their clips section. I was planning on embedding the entire video when I realized that you can choose any start and end point in the video, and get a very precise clip of the show to embed in your blog.

For someone who has at least three blogs in development on the topic of media, entertainment and online video, this is a Godsend. I’m happy to promote Hulu and the embedded video is beautiful, sleek, bug-free and professional looking.

There are only two downsides I see to Hulu right now.

1- Not enough content.

I’m a web warrior. What little content that is on their site that is re-watchable and I haven’t already seen, I’ll have consumed in one slow week. But I expect that to be remedied as new content comes out – even with the recently ended writer’s strike there’s some pretty recent stuff up there. Meaning this seasons.

That’s right. You can catch up on some seasons of shows that you missed in a day.

2- The TV Clips Section, Also Known as Cock Tease. (Or Pussy Tease if you’re a chick).

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the TV Clips section. It’s just a bit of bad juju marketing and I’ll tell you why.

There you are, innocently browsing the site. You skim like most web readers do and a gem like Nip/Tuck jumps out at you.

Excited because you saw a really good episode that you didn’t quite get, and so vowed to watch from the beginning, you click through to the page, hoping they have the first season up.

Not only do you find out there’s no first season, there aren’t any seasons at all. It’s clips only. Mother. Fuck.

It’s not the end of the world, but just like having the promise of sex, right up to rubbing naked genitalia, and then Not actually having the sex, it’s kind of fucking annoying. To avoid that, you can go to the Alphabetical listings page, where it’s clearly marked which TV Shows are full features.

But it would be much, much better to have a TV Full Episodes section, a full Movies section, and then a separate clips section divided into TV and Movies that is cross referenced on the full listing of each. To a brand new person, even one as somewhat net savvy as myself, it leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth, like Hulu is trying to look like they have more content than they actually do.

Not to knock the TV clips themselves though – I can see where they’d be really useful to bloggers, or to forward to friends in the process of making an argument for watching a show or film. In fact, if Hulu really wants to grow at the speed of light, they should pull a Kyte.TV and include in the embed a way for each embed to automatically generate a link back to each site displaying the video from the listings page.

So the TV clips section isn’t bad in and of itself. But it shouldn’t be mixed in with regular content.

And if you’re thinking I should stop whining and enjoy the free TV and Movie content, fuck you. :) I smile sweetly as I jokingly say that, but seriously? Like the dude in the vacuum commercial, I just like things to work properly.

Or at least as advertised.

Also keep in mind that this is part of a blog post about why Hulu rocks, so I’m still a big fan. They just need to fix those two things and I’m all theirs for life. I even forgot to mention the commercials, they’re that unobtrusive.

So. If you want to watch some old classics like What’s Happening, or Welcome Back Kotter, or watch some new series that you missed on TV this seasons, go over and play at Hulu.