So, what I didn’t know about hulu.com earlier this month is that it’s a joint venture by News Corp (Fox) and NBC. Funny, the hulu.com mission is to deliver premium programming, and since I just love Battlestar Galactica (but wait, isn’t that SciFi? Yes… but NBC owns SciFi) I agree that the programming is indeed premium. What sucks is their delivery. Again, NetFlix takes the cake on viewing, but the selection is limited (even though its growing) and the networks probably won’t let them play current season stuff. Even NBC.com is better, and they own a portion of hulu.com - can’t they get some people together to make some upgrades to the service? Yes, you guessed it, I’m catching up on Battlestar Galactica today. We got rid of paid network programming, either cable or sattelite (tried both) because we’re just not home often and the costs are high for something you rarely watch. I used to watch BSG on iTunes, I even paid the $1.99 per show. But NBC didn’t resign with iTunes because Apple refused to increase costs to $4.99 per show. Go Apple! But now I have Seasons 1-3 in iTunes proprietary format and can’t purchase Season 4 the same way. I should have just bought the DVDs.
April 21st, 2008 at 6:40 pm - Edit
They did at least “fix” it so that when I do a pop-out window for video then use the F11 key for full screen you don’t see the browser borders. But playback is still grainy and choppy. *sigh*
April 22nd, 2008 at 2:20 pm - Edit
Hi. I’m a software engineer working on advertising products over at Hulu. I just noticed your post(s) about so-so viewing quality and wanted to offer some suggestions.
First, you may want to ensure that you’ve upgraded to the latest version of Flash. We’ve seen some issues with older versions in full-screen mode.
Second, please check out our technical FAQ at http://www.hulu.com/support/technical_faq — and especially http://www.hulu.com/support/technical_faq#upgrade if you’re running the latest version of Flash.
Finally, I personally have had issues on my laptop when running in reduced power mode: our videos are both bandwidth and CPU intensive, and if your laptop is in “Energy Star” or “Power Saver” mode — I think those are the Thinkpad names for power saving modes — you may get full-screen glitches.
Hopefully this will help somewhat — thanks for using Hulu!
May 18th, 2008 at 4:04 pm - Edit
Hey thanks for the tip, upgrading Flash player worked for my play issues. Is there any way to get feedback from user machines to see which version of Flash they are using? It’d be handier to show a message on the front page of hulu.com letting people know they might get a better experience with a newer version.
May 18th, 2008 at 10:34 pm - Edit
I spoke too soon. It seems like the video playback issues I have are only in full screen modes. If I don’t resize the windows, it seems to work okay - or at least its harder to notice the imperfections.