I requested an invitation to Hulu a month back and just got around to taking the site for a test drive. Hulu is NBC‘s answer to video distribution of their content online. They joined up with New Corp (Fox) to control their content and deliver it via an ad revenue model. NBC has pulled their content from iTunes and is actively searching out their copyrighted material from sites such as YouTube. Personally, I think that the approach of limiting access to your content is a mistake.

After using it for about 30 minutes, I liked what I saw. There’s lots of Web 2.0 goodness which makes the interface engaging and fun. The content is broken into two types: short clips and full episodes. The navigation pushes you towards “popular” clips and episodes that were rated by other users. I watched a couple clips and the video started almost instantaneously. I then started watching the latest episode of Heroes and at full screen on my 21″ widescreen LCD. I was impressed by the quality both in the lack of buffering and the resolution of video. I watched all of Heroes: season 1 via the Netflix “Watch Instantly” service. I’d say that the quality was better on Netflix, but it took a bit longer to start and would only work on Windows with Media Player.

Lastly, I went into the “HD Gallery” and after upgrading to the latest Flash Player, watched the Alien vs Predator trailer. OMG, the video quality was amazing. Yes, I had to pause and cache the download since my 1.5mbps connection stalled, but WOW… I have seen the future and it is HD video streaming.

In an interesting twist, although registration for the beta site is required, I can embed content into this blog so that non-registrants can view it. Here’s an SNL clip with Natalie Portman that helped to put YouTube on the map. NBC pulled it quickly citing copyright infringement and now offers it on Hulu where they have more control.