Hulu Hullabaloo
With the recent anime additions to the popular video streaming site I decided to check out Hulu. I found a couple of pretty interesting things. Hulu could become the one stop anime streaming site I was talking about before. With the right additions and a larger library of fresh anime I’d easily pay for a premium subscription.
Quality
The streams from Hulu look, and sound, great. Crisp and clean with smooth playback. I’m not sure what they’re using under the hood, but it works very well. It’s quick to play too, at least it has been for me. The quality is more than acceptable.
Features
Poking around I found the basic features. Embedding, sharing, full screen and the ability to comment are all available. The features all seem to work well. There are a couple of things that I really liked.
Lighting
“Lower Lights” darkens the white background of the page around the video area. Judging from the name of the feature, I bet this is based on the lighting arrangement in a movie theater. I didn’t know how much that would help with internet video until I tried it. It really does improve the viewing experience when watching the normal sized video.
Video Window
“Pop Out” opens the video in a new browser window without some of the normal bells and whistles. The video changes size with the browser window. This provides a nice compromise between the normal video size and full screen mode.
Selection
This is the big problem. It’s something they need to get to work on now. A lot of anime fans are not going to sit through even a single 20 second commercial unless they believe the site is worth supporting. A site with only a handful of anime shows does not qualify. I bet a lot of anime fans mentally wrote Hulu off when they saw what slim pickings there were.
Hulu isn’t just competing with the handful of other sites that have legal anime streams and downloads, they’re competing against all the sites with anime streams and downloads. A lot of the shady ones have tons of shows. Let’s not forget YouTube either, it has tons of (illegally) uploaded anime. Hulu should have been ready with at least 3 pages worth of anime titles before even adding that to the site. I don’t mean episodes, I mean titles. At 20 shows per page, Hulu needed 60 different shows, and probably more than that.
Final Thoughts
If Hulu can beef up the number of anime titles that it has, it could be a great anime resource. As of now, there just isn’t enough there. YouTube probably deletes more anime episodes per day than Hulu has online. They can’t even begin to compete with the torrent sites when it comes to numbers.
Don’t write Hulu off just yet though. They’re working to add both subs and dubs of the shows they have. They have a ton of non-anime on the site, but I’m talking about anime only. Give ‘em some time to make a few more deals with the anime companies. Hulu could be awesome.
Anime, Online, Opinion, Streaming, Legal, Subs, Dubs, Hulu, YouTube, Mushi Shi, Astro Boy
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