Hulu is Even Better with Hulu Desktop
About 3 million Americans visit Hulu.com every day to watch their favorite TV episodes for free over the internet with just a browser. As convenient as this is, Hulu has made available a free application for Windows, Mac and Linux that brings all the content from the website packaged up in a gorgeous dedicated application that turns your computer into a mediacenter.
Hulu is a great service (even if it will soon go subscription) that provides TV entertainment with a minimum of advertisements, typically only 3 or 4, 30 second spots per hour hour of programming. This makes for an easy way to catch missed shows but the experience can be so much better if you download and use the free Hulu Desktop application.
Hulu Desktop is a lean-back viewing experience for your personal computer. It features a sleek new look that’s optimized for use with standard Windows Media Center remote controls or Apple remote controls, allowing you to navigate Hulu’s entire library with just six buttons. For users without remotes, the application is keyboard and mouse-enabled.
link: Hulu – Labs: Hulu Desktop
Once you install the application you can browse through Hulu’s entire lineup of content in alphabetical order, by network or by Hulu channel. You can use the keyboard and mouse, or a windows media center or Apple remote to navigate. The best way to use it is to link it to your free Hulu account. Once you do this you have access to to your queue. This means that new episodes of your favorite shows will miraculously appear in your queue when they are available to watch. If you discover a new show you like, you can add that to the queue from inside the application. You can add either a single episode or subscribe to a entire series (in this case all the new episodes will automatically appear in your queue).
Perhaps the best part of Hulu Desktop though, is simply how beautiful it looks, turning your PC into a pretty slick media center that makes watching content so much more enjoyable than the clunky Hulu web interface. The video below shows the interface in action.
Using Hulu Desktop is one of the easiest steps you can take towards Cutting the Cable or Ditching the Dish. Give it a try. I think you’ll be impressed. If you use a Mac, there is even a way to launch the Hulu Desktop application from within the Front Row media interface, but that will have to wait for a future post.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Great post.
Are you intending to cover things like how non US folk can access this? I am aware you know about this, but wasn’t sure if you wanted to include info on this site that had hacks etc or not
Richard
Thanks Richard. The quick answer to your question is yes. We will keep a global perspective both in terms of viewing US content overseas and watching overseas content in the US (for example the BBC iplayer).
Great stuff. Will keep an eye out for it.