Hulu

I've been watching a few films on Hulu, a few quality films, like Kagemusha. The commercial interruptions are a little inelegant, often landing in the middle of scenes, but I always get excited by new adventures in content delivery.

At the basic level, Hulu is just like a high quality YouTube. But the high quality infrastructure allows it to exceed Youtube, allows it attract owners of high quality content (read: feature length content).

For a while, I thought YouTube just highlighted our ever shortening attention spans. But more and more I think people will use the internet to watch videos more than two minutes long, just so long as they don't have to squint the whole time.

Joost, for its part, has some advantages. The commercials seem more intelligently placed. The content has been lacking for a while though, and they focus more on shows. Joost has no easy entry point for outsider art (one of the redeeming features of youtube and myspace), at least not that I've found. Another plus, Hulu runs in a browser, requires no installation. I'm not smart enough to know when exactly that model became the future, but it did. Webapps > ____Apps (Conventional Apps?*). For round one, I think Hulu has the edge.

Direct distribution from content producers to content consumers is one of the things I constantly pine for, I won't beat everyone over the head with it again, just wanted to plug the neat site. It'll be interesting to see what form these video on demand services take, and who will come out on top (Hulu, Joost, some YouTube sequel?).

*No one called a "conventional oven" a "conventional oven" before the invention of the microwave. Now we need some backwards construction for non-webapps. Anyone have a cute one?