

The new Hulu - sahillavingia
http://new.hulu.com

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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.

~~~
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?

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droithomme
I am not seeing that. Let's take the top TV show that I see on the Popular
page right now that you mention - <http://new.hulu.com/grimm>. The drop down
says "All Seasons (24 episodes)". It's a filter for the horizontal slide show
viewer to limit it to only season 1 or season 2. There's no list of episodes.
There's also a sort order drop down with default "air date", although air
dates are not shown nor listed, it's just to select that as the sorting order.
Do you mean some other drop down?

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

~~~
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

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jhchabran
I'm already using a VPN in the US to handle that (Netflix), but they reject my
credit card (french one). Any idea of a workaround ?

EDIT : typo

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mbesto
I _think_ you can buy a US gift card[1] and use that instead. I haven't tried
it, so don't quote me on it ;)

[1] -
[https://www311.americanexpress.com/BOLWeb/bolfeOrder.do?requ...](https://www311.americanexpress.com/BOLWeb/bolfeOrder.do?request_type=orderProduct&promotion=ACP&program=ACPWEB&selleracctnbr=6430098999I&intlink=GC:hm:Pg:PGC)

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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!

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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".

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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.

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jakejake
Netflix seems to be able to do it.

~~~
dangrossman
They're not. Netflix doesn't carry any currently airing season of network or
premium television. Netflix is the new Blockbuster, Hulu is the new cable
company. Both of those consumer models have to exist for the content
production funding model to continue working the way it works.

Netflix isn't going to produce a full prime time lineup of shows every year on
$8 per subscriber. Not at the costs networks currently pay for production
($1.5-2 million per episode generally... with hit shows up to $10-15 million
per episode). Either the ads stay, or they figure out a way to produce shows
of the same quality for _much_ less money.

To give some perspective, more than $60 billion is spent on TV advertising per
year in just the US. So if everyone were to just sell subscriptions at
Netflix's price, in exchange for new television without ads, they would need
to get... every person in the United States (including all the babies) to
subscribe. Twice, per person. Just to make up for the ad revenue, ignoring all
the lost revenue of people dropping cable subscriptions. Otherwise, the money
that currently funds producing these shows just won't exist, so there won't be
anything for them to sell you.

There is no future with everyone on an ad-free Netflix for new TV with content
that costs as much to produce as today's network television.

~~~
donall
The obvious answer seems to be that the cost of production needs to come down.
I wonder how cheaply today's shows could be made if they didn't have the
bureaucracy and bloat of the major content publishers behind them?

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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).

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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.)

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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.

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rdl
Maybe I should buy an instant video to compare quality -- I was assuming
they'd be as bad as the amazon prime instant videos.

~~~
rdl
Quality still horrible, even on paid content. I have a 1080p projector fed
from a ps3, xbox, appletv, and for each, I get what looks like SD, and
overcompressed at that.

Yellowstone (HD) on a Mac (in Chrome) also appears SD-quality. I'm on 100M
comcast business, and everything else works fine, with Amazon reporting it's
in HD mode with good performance, so I think it's just crap encoding :(

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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>

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bradgessler
... aaand it still uses flash.

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slurgfest
Beats requiring Silverlight (Netflix).

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recursive
I prefer silverlight's video player to flash.

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Fando
Not available in Canada :(

