After innumerable delays, technical difficulties, rights management issues, and internal struggles over the business model and terms of service, Hulu.com is finally fully online.
The video-on-demand service, a costly but widely hyped venture of NBC/Universal, was announced to great fanfare last year, and those writers and industry insiders who got a sneak preview (although its form and delivery, at the time, were much different than they are now) announced that it would be a major event when it finally debuted; some even went as far as to call it the savior of television (and a positive boon to the movie industry as well, although the usual DRM issues ended up largely sinking that possibility). What no one anticipated -- not even Hulu's management -- was the long delays they would face in getting their site completely online and functional.
Delays, however, didn't completely sink the product; although it remains to be seen whether users will flock to it in droves -- justifying the advertising outlay that's projected to keep the project financially afloat -- early reports have been good. The service essentially offers viewers high-quality video downloads (not hi-def or even TV quality, but far superior to the usual YouTube level of clarity) with very fast download speeds of movies and television shows, at the cost of watching a few ads. It's nothing more or less than you'd see on commercial television.
The major upside: a number of movies available in their entirety, whenever you want to watch them (although the parsimonious paranoia of the big studios keeps the selection pretty low, you can still see 28 Days Later, Mulholland Drive, and Some Like It Hot, among others, from start to finish anywhere with an internet connection, for free), and a huge number of TV shows (including the most recently aired episodes of The Simpsons and the entire series run of Arrested Development, for example) for nothing more than a simple registration. The downsides: limited selection of movies, no bonus features, limited interface control, and worst of all, no ability to download. But it's fast, it's free, and it's legal, and if nothing else, it represents one of the very few instances in recent memory of the big entertainment conglomerates actually using digital technology to their advantage and offering it as a choice to their customers, rather than treating it as a suspicious interloper to be fought off at worst and treated like an unwelcome guest they hope will go away at best.
