Blog 5

BLOG #5

Hulu vs. YouTube

Scott Tindall

Cassie Trevino

Valerie Vega

When we arrived at the Hulu, the very first show that we saw happened to be FOX's Family Guy. It was being advertised at the top of the website, extremely larger than other hyperlinks for shows. The clip that was picked to advertise Family Guy was a clip of Peter, the father, apparently shouting at his wife Louis. The episode that we watched was very funny. It almost seemed like they should have advertised this episode of Family Guy a little more. They do, however, have a vast amount of clips and full episodes of Family Guy at the bottom of the episode that we watched. There is a list of episodes, according to season, and there is another list consisting of clips from past episodes of Family Guy. As the mouse clicker comes in contact with the title of each episode or clip, a box pops up next to the mouse with a picture of said clip, the title of the clip, and also a brief summary about the clip or episode. We thought this was a very cool feature that Hulu has added to its arsenal. The only ad that we saw on the site was for whatnow.com. It was located in the top right corner of the Hulu page. We thought that there would be many more ads than this on the Hulu site. There is a very active discussion board at the bottom of the page. There are certain conversations that go on for hours. There is an option on the left side of the episode that will let a viewer e-mail the episode to as many friends as desired. You can even dim the lights of the page that are located behind the clip or you can bring the episode up on full screen, both options are given. There is also an icon, which if clicked on, will allow you to watch the episode in high resolution. There is even an embed feature. In our opinion, this site in one of the best, if not the best, when it comes to watching television on the Internet.


It took a little more searching on YouTube to find what we needed. We searched for the same episode that we watched on Hulu, but all we could find was either clips from said episode or pieces of the episode cut up into three or four parts. Seeing that we are all very use to the YouTube format, there was nothing on the site that really grabbed our eyes. When it came to ads on the other hand, YouTube had ads for Target, Amazon and also Yahoo shopping. The clips of Family Guy did not seem to be very reliable. When we clicked on a few of them, there would be a completely different clip from some other show that would come up. Most of the posts on YouTube tend to come from random fans on the Internet. Not very many of these clops seem to come from a "reliable" source.


Hulu has a very strong advantage over YouTube if you only count television clips. Hulu is a very advanced television viewing website, that much is clear. But when it comes to current clips, whether it be from must see TV, the news networks, or home video YouTube had the upper hand. Other than YouTube changing its websites format, much like Facebook did, we do not expect that it will have to make any drastic changes in the manner in which it presents information.