This week, Hulu released its desktop player for Mac. If you're a TV-loving Mac user, you probably tried Boxee to disastrous affect. So is Hulu's homegrown app any better?
Not only is it better, it's downright amazing. Firing up Hulu Desktop is a lot like turning on a TV: just one click and you've got a show on-screen, playing where you last left off. The image is larger than on Hulu's Web interface, and the sound quality seems better as well. That's because Hulu Desktop defaults to High Quality streaming, unlike its Web counterpart. If your connection is slow, this will be painful, but loading seems to happen more quickly through desktop than Web in my tests.
There are only three buttons: Start Watching, Menu, and Login. The image itself is also a button: click it, and the show you're watching spreads to the full size of the window, and reveals the size of the buffer, the episode, and its average ratings.
Here's where things get trippy: hit Command-F, and enter into full screen mode. Hit Escape to get out, and, no, you don't get back to your desktop; the video playing gets shuttled into the corner of the screen, and you're taken to a Front Row-like interface where you can browse through all of Hulu's offerings in a clean, snappy interface that can--brilliantly--be manipulated by the scroll wheel on your mouse.
Download it at Hulu Labs.
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Related Stories: | Topics:Innovation, Technology, Design, hulu, streaming, video, Consumer Products, Enterprise, innovative products, it, products, Science and Technology, Technology, Internet, Hulu LLC, Internet Broadcasting |
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Recent Comments | 6 Total
June 2, 2009 at 3:45pm by Nathaniel Salzman
Hulu Desktop is fantastic! Between Hulu and Netflix Instant Queue via Xbox 360, I have basically no need for cable. I've got my HDTV hooked up to my iMac via a VGA cable and then I ran a set of speakers behind the TV so that audio comes from the TV rather than the computer. The experience is seamless and High quality Hulu looks about as good as digital cable, if not a little better.
One thing you didn't mention in your article is that Hulu Desktop is fully integrated with the Apple Remote for full couch potato bliss. You can adjust volume and navigate the show menus all without having to put your hand on a mouse. This really is the future of TV, I'd wager. Also very nice is how once you finish one episode of a show, it starts the next automatically — a fantastic feature when you're trying to catch up on episodes of Rescue Me, or want to watch Arrested Development from end to end.
June 2, 2009 at 4:29pm by Douglas Paul
the reason i'm still going with boxee is because i have a lot of movies and old tv episodes on my external hd that hulu won't let me watch thru their app. that's a huge deal for me.
June 2, 2009 at 4:41pm by Lynne d Johnson
@Douglas Paul -- That's a good point. I've been playing with hulu since this post first went up today and I'm definitely impressed. It definitely puts Joost to shame. But having the ability to use the app/player to watch other content, is a huge deal. The quality of this thing is vivid -- beautiful even. Can't stop looking at it.
June 3, 2009 at 7:55am by Arthur Freed
Yes, it does look and handle great -- but..for all of us ex-pats living around the world, we (along with many foreign audiences who in their own right are interested) still just get a blank screen, and an apology over not having "rights". It seems to me, the whole point of attacking downloaders and addressing consumer's desire to watch or even embed the few tv shows that matter, is to go OUTSIDE the national boundaries of a country that anyway gets that show on TV to begin with. It's still a very, very short-sighted system. We Americans are happy to address ourselves but don't recall the problem with viewing and downloading is to a large degree OUTSIDE the national boundaries. And no, waiting a year or so for a dvd for a sitcom (if they get that treatment) is not logical, and certainly silly with topical nightly shows. Until that's handled better, everyone I know just downloads the program an hour later. Hulu designs and dresses up what is essentially still the problem: the TV networks out-of-date perspectives which are still far behind their potential publics new habits.