I’ve been playing with Hulu.com for the past week and I honestly have to say that I love it! I almost never watch network television so I don’t even know when what few shows I like are even on. I’ve gone through all the Office episodes they have as well as some of the Kitchen Nightmares and 30 Days (Morgan Spulocks show) episodes.

The quality of the video playback is quite nice and the “commercials”, while annoying, are generally pretty quick. One annoyance with the commercials is that you are actually forced to watch them. So if I have a video playing and I open a new tab, say to check my gmail, and the video progresses to a commercial, it will stop playing all together. I have to switch back to the Hulu tab for the ad to play through. Obviously this half makes sense and can help act as a timed-pause feature – why would I be surfing another site while watching a video, right? One huge plus is that once you watch a commercial within a single video, that’s it. You do not have to watch it again, unless of course you refresh the page.

A couple cool features are the Lower Lights and the Trim Embed Clip features. The Lower Lights feature does just that, it dims the page around the video, similar to Lightbox. The Trim Embed Clip lets you trim a video so you can embed just the chunk of the video you’d like to.

The Office: Local Ad

“Coming Up On…” has to be one of the most irritating phrases in reality television.

Yes. Let’s waste thirty seconds showing highlights from a scene we are about to see. Program developers are so afraid that our tv-dope-sick mind will wander to another station that they will do anything to keep us watching.

Please. We are not idiots. We get it. A climax every six minutes followed by a commercial. Oh. Wait. The commercial is the climax.

We love TV. We’re addicted. We’re watching your show. Quit fucking with us!