Blog 5: YouTube and Hulu

For this blog post, I actually stumbled across the YouTube video that I watched on a former co-worker's Facebook status. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJBjThjxQHc). The clip was of a performance of a British rap artist at the music festival that we both worked to plan. About 15 seconds into the video, the recorder pans over to an elderly woman juggling in the audience. I found this hilarious because I was really only expecting to see the performance, and old ladies juggling is generally a pretty funny sight. For my Hulu video, I watched an episode of Community that I'd missed from two weeks ago (Epidemiology). This seemed to more closely parallel the experience of watching the show on TV. At every scheduled commercial break, there was some sort of advertisement (albeit only one). In the past, I've had the opportunity to watch a more lengthy commercial at the beginning of the program in order to avoid the interruptions during the show. 


While I do like browsing for clips on YouTube, I find that it's generally better for novelty videos (One of my all-time personal favorites being "Single Ladies Gone Wrong"...watch it, its hilarious). I also frequently use YouTube to find music videos, or a full version of a song that I don't have in my iTunes library. However, YouTube doesn't have a huge amount of credibility, considering that anyone can put up whatever they want. Sometimes it just feels like there's so much to sift through on YouTube that it's daunting, and realistically, most of the things on there are probably not worth my time. However, that doesn't change the fact that there are a lot of gems on the site, not to mention that it lowers the barriers of involvement with video production and distribution. I have to admit, I'm guilty of posting videos of my friends and I goofing around on YouTube. Hulu, on the other hand, feels more like watching a disc of a TV show's DVD. You can find full episodes, clips, and special features. Because the content is provided directly to Hulu, the quality is consistently better, which makes me more inclined to choose Hulu than sites like YouTube or ch131.com to catch up on TV shows and clips, if they're available.