This is not an endorsement or advertisement but hulu.com is one of the recent website that has impressed me as well as becoming addicted to it. Among many of the video streaming websites (youtube.com, veoh.com, etc) hulu stands because it stays away from mostly low quality home videos and making it exclusively a live TV show and movie streaming service. It is 100% free to its viewers. Thanks to the partnering ship with mainly FOX, NBC and other TV channels, hulu is able to deliver hundreds of TV shows in one place. More impressively, it also had deal with NBA and have NBA games as well as college football games for a sports nut like myself.

The service divides mainly into 3 parts: TV, movies, and video clips. Although the movie selection was not impressive, it did offer 480p DVD quality option which was much to my pleasant surprise. I enjoyed watching the girl next door, Titan A.E. and other movies. It did require registration for movies that were rated PG. As for video clips I find them to be refreshing as well, like mentioned before, these video clips are pretty high quality as well, some featured one include SNL skids, late night show segments etc.

Lastly, hulu is also experimenting with HD as they have a section called HD gallery, it is mainly streaming movie previews and very short clips, unlike apple trailer hulu uses flv format instead of quick time. It is likely using H.264 or even better encoding techniques.

There are some drawback to hulu though, for example, going from a 3.0 mbps cable connection to a slower: 768 kbps connection, streaming was skiddish not to mention play a movie in 480p DVD quality. That means that hulu eats a lot of bandwidth, with current residential average connection speed it is likely only the higher connection speed users can enjoy the full benefits. There were commercials but I did not mind them that much. Also, many of hulu’s TV selections are incomplete, bringing only the most recent TV episodes. The HD gallery is also in very infant stage because it requires extremely fast connection to be able to stream a movie in 1080p as of current network technology.

The promise hulu brings is impressive, as of right now, I’m going to enjoy astroboy, hell’s kitchen and many of my other favorite shows there!