New Media: Hulu & YouTube

Megan McDougall
Grady McGee

We chose to watch 30 Rock on hulu.com. Hulu only has the past five episodes of 30 Rock, but has many clips from past seasons. It also has a lot of clips that are supplemental to the show; it has interviews with cast and crew as well as "webisodes" featuring Kenneth "The Paige". The show's main page contains five subsections: clips, full episodes, details about the show such as a description and cast information, discussions, and user reviews. At the bottom of the page, there is a section of "Shows You Might Enjoy." For this program, the site recommends "Arrested Development", "Saturday Night Live", "The Mary Tyler Moore Show", "The Office", and "The Daily Show". Hulu offers quite a few options to share the program. It has a share feature where you can send a link to the episode to someone via e-mail or instant message. One of my favorite features is the embedding feature in which you can embed the video on nearly any website. The best quality of embedding on hulu is that you can choose a specific time frame from the clip to embed. There are also options to view the program in full-screen or high resolution. The site is very clean looking and almost free of ads. Their main source of advertising is commercials during breaks in the episodes. In a typical 30 minute show, there are about three or four advertisements.



We couldn't find complete episodes of any television program on YouTube. There were, however, many episodes of various shows broken into a few separate clips. We chose to watch episode one of the new US remake of Kath & Kim. It was in three parts, and the first segment didn't even start until the mid-opening credits. The program is presented on a pretty organized page with "related videos" to the right and "user comments" below. There is a share option in which you can send the video to someone or embed it on almost any other site. The comments section contains an area where users can post "video responses" to the clip. The "related videos" section contains 20 videos that are somehow related to the clip. The only advertisements are the ones that pop up on the lower side of the screen during the video. The three clips that form a nearly-complete episode were posted by a user named "michelle1111101". That is obviously not a network's username.




There are advantages and disadvantages to both sites. Hulu is much more organized than YouTube is. Hulu promotes mostly full episodes of television shows and full movies. Hulu is updated very frequently. For instance, a show that premiers on a Thursday night is usually on the site by Friday morning. A good quality of YouTube is that users can submit their own videos, while Hulu's videos are updated by networks and distributors. Hopefully YouTube won't become another Hulu. They both have distinct features that are unique to other sites.