What Can You Do With The Website Hulu

One of the hottest new sites on the Internet is Hulu

. This website, named for two Mandarin Chinese words, Pinyin and Calabash is the latest thing in the world of Internet TV. Hulu started out as a joint venture between Paramount studios and CBS Television. So what exactly is Hulu and what can you do with it?

The real question should be what you can't do with it and the answer would be not much. Let's get to the basics. There is no live TV on Hulu. So if you're just looking to flip channels, you may want to check out other options. The movie selection is also pretty limited. However, hundreds of hit TV shows are available on the site and hundreds of movies as well (albeit some of them are a little old or even unknown).

Hulu makes use of advertising to pay for the cost of the service and they embed it into all their shows. What that means in simple terms is that you can watch a show, but then you will be forced to sit through several 30 second commercials, just like on TV (although unlike on TV, it's usually just one commercial at a time, not 10 of them.

Better make that run for the fridge really fast!). Unlike TV however, the commercial can be paused and so can the show. So you could pick up the phone in the middle of watching a show. Don't forget, this is not live. It's all recorded and being streamed to your computer through the Internet (hence the name Internet TV).

Probably one of the biggest complaints of the Hulu service though is that it ties you to the computer. There is no way to simply watch Hulu on your TV and most people don't really enjoy curling up in front of the computer to watch television. Various options have been tried in recent years to overcome this problem, some by outside vendors and at least one by Hulu itself.

One of the earliest attempts to tame the Hulu beast was the creation of Paul Yanez, an Internet developer who had created several other similar programs for other platforms. It was called Hulu Media Player and then renamed My Media Player. Today, My Media Player 2 can be downloaded directly from Yanez's site. It attempts to create a "10 foot experience" where you can watch a show on your TV by connecting it to a computer.

Hulu themselves got into the game by creating their own "10 foot player" called Hulu Desktop. It is currently in beta testing. Neither of these options though solves the most pressing problem, that most people still don't connect their computers to their TVs. That is the killer app still waiting to be created for Hulu, a TV with built in Hulu access to create a true Internet TV.

by: Richard Cunningham

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