A recent failure in the cooling system of my television has rendered it dead. While I’m waiting for it be repaired, I’ve had to get my fix from online video streaming sites. At first I was skeptical because of the past attempts and poor interfaces, such as ads running concurrently as well as lack of full episodes.
Over the past week, I’ve used a few ad driven sites; hulu.com, abc.com, and cbs.com. Hulu.com and CBS.com offer the best experience from my perspective.
Hulu.com has the cleanest overall interface. It offers both TV episodes and movies. Both in clip form and full length. You click and it starts playing. You do have to watch commercials, each ranging about 15 to 30 seconds. You have to watch about two minutes worth for a 30 minute episode.
Hulu’s player is slick, you have your typical play/pause/forward/rewind options, but you also have the option to go fullscreen. Something else they introduce is to dim the lights, which will grey out the rest of the screen. That’s a nice little feature to focus on the video.
Streaming started almost immediately and required no installation since Hulu is making use of Flash. The quality was great as well. I did notice some pixellation when I switched to full screen, but that may have been my connection speed at the time.
With shows just coming back, it was difficult to judge how up to date the content was. It does appear as if content is being added on a daily basis, some of it syndicated shows.
I did manage to find up to date episodes as well as HD quality on ABC’s site. I’m not convinced it’s 1080i as I would expect from my cable provider, but more like 480p. ABC also decided to package the Flash application into a custom wrapper, so I had to grant permission to ABC to install this application in order to play. That’s definitely a knock against ABC.
Once installed, I had to wait 30 seconds for the player to load up two carousels, one related to ABC shows available for viewing and another smaller one related to clips from the episode I was watching. The former was pointless, I’ve already selected the show I wanted to watch.
Once episode played, the quality was good, the streamed content was delivered without any delays. I watched about three minutes of commercials, which is not bad at all. Each one after a 8 to 10 minute block. The only annoying part of commercials was that when thirty seconds were up, I had to click a button to continue watching my episode. The reason behind this is that the commercials were not necessarily 30 seconds long, its just was ABC set as the minimum viewing time. Hulu on the other hand seems to have reformatted to integrate seamlessly.
CBS’s take was similar to Hulu, get users to the content and make it easy to play. Again, no custom Flash installation, full screen good quality video and about two minutes of commercial. Like Hulu, CBS delivered content almost immediately. None of them really offer an innovation of viewing experience, but they do translate the experience of my DVR and TV screen to my browser screen.
Ranking the options, Hulu is first, CBS second, and ABC third. What’s great though is that they are all viable options for watching episodes. I’m not yet convinced that I can cancel my cable subscription, but its no longer a never, its just a not yet.
