Green Tech Girl

Hulu Launches Paid “Plus” Service

I like Hulu for its online streaming video, but one of the main reasons was that it was free and had very brief commercials. Unfortunately, getting current episodes in any sort of timely fashion (and keeping up with them before they expire) has not been the easiest on Hulu.

Hulu is “solving” this problem by adding a $9.99 monthly paid service. The main “benefit” is that you can access entire seasons of many TV shows. Problem is, you still have to watch ads, and Netflix trounces Hulu when it comes to movie availability (and lack of ads). Judging from the comments posted on this Yahoo news article, the reception to Hulu’s new Plus service is not just negative, but downright hostile. As one commenter said succinctly:

Hulu actually has employees with business degrees and they come up with this?

Really?

What Hulu isn’t getting is that they are not just in competition with Netflix, but DVRs and torrents. I’d consider paying $9.99/month for no advertising and a huge selection along with high quality streaming, but I certainly wouldn’t at Hulu’s current level of service. They are promising HD quality for the extra fee…which would be enticing were it not for the fact that half the time my Hulu videos are as jerky as webcams were back in 2002, and I often manually lower the video quality to try to improve the streaming experience.

It remains to be seen whether Hulu’s new Plus service will take off. In the meantime, if you want to try another free streaming video site, check out Crackle. They have a quirky selection and actual real staff members respond to your questions in the comments.

One thing that will be going the way of the do-do eventually with all of this online streaming will be the hard copy DVD rental. Red Box and Blockbuster watch out!

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A Quick Look at Google Chrome OS

Google has their own operating system that is being developed for Netbooks – call it Chrome OS or Chromium, your choice. I downloaded a version bootable by USB, developed by a very smart 17-year-old. With bootable USB in hand, I was able to get Chrome OS running on my laptop. Here are my first impressions:

Basically, Chromium is Google’s Chrome browser set up as an operating system. When you boot up and login, you are put into Chrome. From there, you can use Google Apps to get your work done via the “cloud.”

There is no way to save things to the hard drive or install native applications. It’s designed that way. You have to have Internet access to do anything.

This might be fine, but in my first attempt to use the OS, it did manage to find my wifi network, but froze on the authentication. It also didn’t seem to like my external mouse much. Ultimately, the system hung and I shut it down. I’ll play with it more later.

I’d say, this is a promising “lite” operating system, if just to have on USB for those times when your hard drive dies and you just want to login to the Internet to check your email. Whether it will be robust enough for daily use remains to be seen.

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