I received my "private beta invitation" from hulu.com a couple of weeks ago and I've been thoroughly impressed from day one. It has a great selection of shows, a near-perfect user interface, and fast, high-quality video.

For those not familiar with Hulu, it started out as a joint venture between NBC and Fox to showcase their primetime shows and has grown beyond that.

Here's what I like about Hulu:

• Great show selection.
• Simple, easy-to-use, uncluttered user interafce
• Automatically resume playing a show right where you left off (even recovers from browser crashes)
• Full-screen viewing option
• Descent video quality: you will notice macro-blocking and the lower frame rate in full screen mode, but it is by no means distracting, especially if you scoot back from your screen an extra foot or two
• HD Video: this will eliminate all quality complaints, but it's only available for a few movie trailers at this point
• Commercials: there is one 30 second commercial every 15 minutes. Not bad. And all of the commercials are for the same company, so you kinda know what to expect when it is commercial time, which makes them almost enjoyable. Yes, you read that correctly, I was actually enjoying that Toyota commercial by the end of the show.

You can catch episodes of Firefly, Heroes, The Office, Scrubs, Chuck, 30 Rock, House, Battlestar Galactica (new and classic), Rosewell, Arrested Development, Journeyman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mary Tyler Moore, and many, many more.

Conclusion

It's great entertainment when you need a break (such as from visiting your family over the holidays.) Sign-up for an invitation now; it took me about a week to receive mine. In the meantime, you can view shows on openhulu.com.

Just Playing Around

And finally, one of the coolest features is that you can embed your favorite shows into your own website. Instead of simply posting about how great a show is, show an episode. Here are some of my favorites:

Firefly: Perhaps one of the best science fiction TV shows ever shown on network TV. You can watch the entire series online; here is the first episode:

Roswell: I'd never watched a single episode but noticed its high rating on Hulu. I watched the pilot and decided that I missed out on a great series. This is definitely something I'll be watching via hulu. Here is the pilot:

Journeyman: NBC has apparently canceled this show (yet decided to keep the unwatchable Bionic Woman remake alive.) I think people found Journeyman too difficult to follow, especially if they missed an episode. Out of all current shows on TV, I thought it has/had the best theme song and background music. Maybe watching it online will cause a revival. Here's a clip from Episode 8:

I'm not going to write a comprehensive review of the movie, I'm just going to sum it up like this: The Bourne Ultimatum is the best movie of the summer. The plot is smart, the action scenes are intimate and intense, and the time line is ingeniously tied to the previous movie. Casino Royale was the best James Bond movie ever and The Bourne Ultimatum is better.

My entertainment advise for the weekend is to immediately pop The Bourne Supremacy into your DVD player for a 2-hour refresher because you don't want to miss the ties between the two movies. Then head to movie theater and see how the story line is completed and experience the paradigm shift Ultimatum imparts on the final scene of Supremacy; it is very well done.

I've been a Netflix subscriber since 2001 and rented from them starting in 1999. When I received an e-mail about a Netflix class action lawsuit, I knew immediately what prompted it. They promised unlimited rentals but they wouldn't ship out new DVDs until several days after the movie was returned to them, thus artificially limiting the number of movies you could rent in a month. They would claim issues with the US Postal Service, but I found it strange that the USPS would hold on to every Netflix movie sent to them for several days before delivering it. Of course, this was not the case and Netflix was falsely advertising their service.

I was a bit surprised by the settlement though. Only one month of rentals at one tier above your current plan. So I received the potential to watch an extra one or two movies, a $4 value based on their pricing, in exchange for them cheating me out of a couple of DVD rentals each month for the past 2 or so years. That just didn't seem fair to me. So I did some searching and came across NetflixSettlementSucks.com. I'm not the only one upset about the settlement and the settlement was more unfair than I imagined. The 1-month-free-upgrade had be canceled by the customer after the first months or they would starting paying more each months. Also, the lawyers would be paid $2.5 million for the "great benefit" bestowed upon the poor customer. Great settlement for Netflix and the lawyers; not so great for the customers. But according to NetflixSettlementSucks.com, the offer is being revisited.

During 2005, I switched from a "2-at-a-time unlimited" plan to a "2-at-a-time max of 4 per month" plan. When I switched, I found it weird that if I sent in a movie on Monday, I would have a new movie of Thursday at the latest (providing I hadn't already used my 4 rentals that month). Obviously, Netflix did not delay shipments with this plan because I could never rent more than 4 each month anyway. This was definitely not the case with the "unlimited" plan; a movie shipped on Monday wouldn't be replaced until Tuesday of the following week. So, I guess I solved this problem myself by switching to a plan that states that the number of rentals is limited. However, I do feel that I should receive 1 free rental for each month I was on the unlimited plan, because it that is the minimum number of rentals I missed-out on each month.