I rarely use Hulu to watch TV shows, not because I don’t like it but because I usually forget which shows are available on Hulu and which are not. I often use sites like ch131.com or sidereel.com, which sometimes redirect me to Hulu but always have a link to the show I’m looking for. For this assignment I went directly to Hulu to watch an episode of Grey’s Anatomy I missed on Thursday. I typed “Grey’s Anatomy” into the search bar and was met with a list of all of the latest full episodes. I clicked on the one I had missed and the video began. As expected the video opened with an ad that I was forced to watch before the episode started. There was no option to click out of the advertisement, so I watched until all 60 seconds (which counted down in a top left corner) had run out. Then the video ran in perfect quality and in its entirety - stopping about 3 times for more ads.
In order to adequately compare my Hulu experience to my YouTube experience I attempted to watch the same episode of Grey’s Anatomy on YouTube. I don’t usually use YouTube to watch full-length TV shows, rather I watch music videos and short, funny videos my friends send me or I find on Facebook. In any case I visited www.youtube.com and typed “Grey’s anatomy” into the search in my attempt to compare the two separate viewing experiences. The search results that came back were very different from when I typed Grey’s Anatomy into Hulu. On Hulu episodes came back in a chronological order, labeled and organized by seasons and episode name. On YouTube however, results came back in a scrambled order offering clips entitled “signature scenes”, “season 5 final scene” , a music video – “grey’s anatomy how to save a life” etc.. I attempted to narrow my search by typing in the name of the episode I had previously watched on Hulu. Having narrowed my search, the results did in fact return the episode I was looking for; however it was returned in parts. YouTube offered me the ability to watch the episode in 5 separate parts. I decided to watch part 1 of 5 to determine if the quality of the video was comparable to that of Hulu. The video opened with a screen shot of “Watch full episode now” and link where I could do that. Other than the video was pretty clear and was never interrupted by ads. When the 8 min 22 second video ran out I wondered if part 2 would start automatically but that was not the case.
Overall, my comparison of Hulu and YouTube is as follows. Although both provide almost synonymous content, they seem to cater to different types of video. Hulu is better for watching longer videos while YouTube caters to shorter videos such as music videos or short viral videos. Hulu also seems to organize its TV content in a more clear fashion; making watching missed episodes of TV programming easy and accessible. In the future I plan to stick to Hulu for TV programming and use YouTube to find music and watch funny clips.
No comments:
Post a Comment