The new Hulu

[droithomme]

It used to be pretty nice to navigate, you go to the show page and there's a list of the episodes they have available and their air dates, along with another list of clips and webisodes. You also have recommended related shows, information about when new episodes are released. Hovering over any title shows a brief description of the episode.

Then on each individual episode page, discussion about the show.

Within the viewers, heat graph timelines available showing what parts people watched the most.

All this is gone.

Instead, animated episode titles in a slide show. Can't find a list of episodes available, seems to not exist except by playing catch-the-moving-tile, a frustrating game with little pay off. Discussions are now in a comments section which seems to be empty on most pages. Pages are slow to load.

No doubt the UI experts that created this monstrosity are the best and the brightest, from the latest schools with the most contemporary techniques. They always are.

[dpcan]

I use Hulu daily, and am a subscriber, and I have to say I LOVE this new layout. I clicked on popular shows. Clicked on The Office. Drop down by season. Zipped through the episodes, and picked one.

I don't think it gets any easier than this.

It also remembered the last episode I was watching above the other episodes. Perfect.

Before, to pick a season, you had to pick 1 or the highest season, then do a strange paging thing to get all the way back to the first episode. It was a mess.

The viewing area is now larger it seems, with more "black" area around it without having to turn on the night vision thing.

At any rate, as an avid user, I think they nailed it.

[nightski]

First thing I did was click Browse->TV->Popular. List of shows. Click on a Show. Right under episodes to the right there is a drop-down with the list of available episodes.

I am not saying its perfect, but is it nearly as bad as you are making it out to be?

[freehunter]

I haven't seen the new Hulu yet (blocked by corporate proxy), but their old design was only good when I was logged out. Once I logged in, the "popular shows" list was removed and replaced with "your friends recently watched...". That option may still have been around, but I never found it.

[jerrya]

It's tabletlicious.

[redstripe]

"Sorry, currently our video library can only be watched from within the United States" - same as the old Hulu

[dusing]

Every conversation about Hulu gets highjacked by this kind of talk. We get it, its not changing anytime soon, and its not even Hulu's fault.

Now back to the topic at hand...

[stanleydrew]

This is not a terribly difficult restriction to get around:

    1) Boot an ec2 instance in VA, US
    2) ssh -D 8888 <ec2hostname>
    3) Configure Chrome/FF to use a SOCKS proxy on localhost:8888

[jeffool]

Sadly, that's not Hulu, that's the rights holders. And that's not changing for a long time.

[house9-2]

Checkout http://www.unblock-us.com/ to get around this, i was able to watch olympics on bbc which was great

[addies]

I wrote a blog post (http://goo.gl/PnaxJ) on this a while back along with a work around

[necenzurat]

meh... you can try thepiratebay.se

[sgdesign]

Wow, what a great site. I love the design of their new "our video library can only be streamed within the United States" message. Very readable, good typography, a big improvement over the previous version. This redesign is definitely a success!

[jeffool]

Taking a few minutes, looking around, it's fine. In fact, I dig it. But was design ever the problem for Hulu? Content is king here, and Hulu just doesn't have it.

As a viewer, I expect a site like this has to either be niche, or truly all encompassing. I think things like Stargate or Highlander could support their own sites. Comedy Central was smart to do their stuff (South Park, Daily Show, Colbert) by show. CBS even does Star Trek on StarTrek.com. Hulu seems to try to do everything, but fails. I genuinely think they could do better if they spun off niche sites, crediting them all as "Brought to you by Hulu".

[jakejake]

I am anxious to give Hulu my money, however the paid "plus" membership has way too many ads. I understand they have their business plan numbers worked out, but the payed membership shouldn't have the same number of ads as the free version.

[dangrossman]

There's a wildly successful and profitable business model for getting money for TV content. It's cable and satellite subscriptions. More than half of all households in the US pay for a cable subscription.

Everyone (in the US) gets TV content from the major networks for free -- just connect an antenna to your TV. You can pay to get more content, and access to previous seasons, by subscribing to cable or satellite. Subscribing doesn't reduce the ads at all, just gets you more things to watch.

Hulu is an exact replica of the business model, except using the web instead of radio and cable lines, as the delivery method.

Everyone (in the US) gets TV content from Hulu for free -- just browse to their website. You can pay to get more content, and access to previous seasons, by subscribing to Hulu Plus. Subscribing to Hulu Plus doesn't reduce the ads at all, just gets you more things to watch.

The only difference is that a cable subscription averages more than 10 times the monthly cost of Hulu Plus. To expect to not only pay 90% less than cable, but also eliminate the advertising, is unrealistic.

[dpcan]

I think the point of the subscription is actually that you get more content, not less ads.

I watch a lot of past seasons of shows, and frankly, there are so few ads I barely remember the last one I saw.

[shuri]

Very nice. Some thoughts.

The old slideshow was amazingly annoying. You click, it slides by slowly but doesn't reveal the text. You wait some more until the text slowly fades in...nope not interesting. You click again. I would still make the text fade in faster.

The new layout looks very nice. I would make the hover details appear faster as well, only a sliver of time after the play button appears.

The title in the hover-details should be more obviously clickable. Personally, I really don't like having to blindly mouse around until I stumble upon something clickable (even though it seems like the trendy thing to do).

[rdl]

I rarely use the website to watch Hulu, and really don't get much value out of Hulu Plus on console. I wish they'd put effort into licensing worthwhile content vs.

(Also, Amazon Prime streaming is usually HORRIBLE video quality for me, as well as selection. Netflix is really the only non-pirated service with decent selection and quality, and even it really lacks for selection compared to 2y ago. But I don't want to pay $20/movie for iTunes movies.)

[sil3ntmac]

Amazon Instant Video is great though... except that you must use a browser to purchase videos. You can then access them in your "Instant Video Library" on console.

[azylman]

The videos still don't fill the whole screen when not maximized like Netflix. :(

Also, HuluWithMe doesn't work in it.

Other than that, I like it a lot.

[james4k]

Unfortunately, there are still an annoying number of ads, which is the main reason I got rid of my Plus subscription.

Can anyone comment on whether or not things have improved for subscribers?

Edit: Come to think of it, it was more the fact that so many ads repeated, rather than the number or length of them.

[onedev]

One thing I noticed is that the content doesn't fit the screen as well as it used to.

The graphics are all really big and takes a bit of scrolling to explore the frontpage, which I don't think is an optimal design choice.

However, its a great redesign overall. Reminds me a bit of Netflix.

[iceron]

One of the more interesting things about this new version is its "face match" feature. It allows you to highlight over an actors face and it gives you card of information about them.

http://new.hulu.com/labs/tagging

[bradgessler]

... aaand it still uses flash.

[slurgfest]

Beats requiring Silverlight (Netflix).

[Fando]

Not available in Canada :(