<mini rant>

So I finally had my first real reason to go try Hulu tonight. I somehow completely forgot that Battlestar Galactica had started again, and as the only show I am catching somewhat near the live release, I had in interest in seeing it. First stop out of habit was to go to iTunes and get ready to fork over $1.99 for my forgetfulness. After searching for a bit I finally remembered NBC Universal left iTunes a while back. Then I remembered Hulu. So I opened Safari on the Mac Mini attached to the TV, found the show, and was presented with a white box where it should be, and Safari indicating it was waiting on one more piece of data. I stop, try again, same result. I then try on my laptop, same result. So no I figure it is my internet connection, and I reset the modem, wireless access point, powerplug bridges, and everything. Same issue. I do a bandwidth test, looks fine, and a download from Fileplanet confirms this. I start to give up, then conveniently find that SciFi was going to run it again at 10, and I have access to cable now that the roomate is subscribing. So I told the Replay to record it and watched it that way, at poor analog non HD cable quality, but without commercials at least.

Once it ended, I wandered back to my laptop, hit reload, and it now decided to work. Out of curiosity, I let it play a bit, and flipped into full screen while Activity monitor was on the other screen. 130% processor use on a 2.0 ghz Core Duo (OS X measures 100% as one core of use), and the quality wasn't much better then the analog cable feed I just watched. Full screen 1080p h.264 trailers don't even take as much processing power.

So anyhow, how is Hulu really all that great? It failed to deliver that "I really want to watch it now" part due to who knows what problem. I was even willing to pay to see the episode, and couldn't. It cripples even a moderately modern machine, excluding many internet users out there from a decent experience because of absolute crap performance of Flash for this. I can appreciate the fact that I didn't have to use some Microsoft solution, but still, how did this improve the situation over what iTunes offered two years ago?

*sigh*

</mini rant>