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For today's show we'll talk about CNet's listing of the 5 best HDTVs they have reviewed.  Then we get into a discussion on Hulu.com - a new video streaming site with a lot of potential.

CNet's Best 5 HDTVs we've reviewed:

 

You gotta check out Hulu.com!

Here's a description from the Hulu.com website:

"Hulu's ambitious and never-ending mission is to help you find and enjoy the world's premium content when, where and how you want it.

Background
Hulu.com opened to the public on March 12 of this year.  They provide online video content from over 50 different content providers including Fox, NBC, MGM, Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers, and Lionsgate.  They stream everything, but it isn't just a bunch of video clips and trailers, they have full length television shows and feature films.  The library includes current prime time hits like Hell's Kitchen, Lost, Heroes and Chuck as well as classic shows like Starsky and Hutch, Miami Vice, Diff'rent Strokes and McHale's Navy.  New shows are even made available the morning after they air on network TV.

The movie library is just as impressive.  They've got great movies like the Usual Suspects, Three Amigos!, and the Big Lebowski.  There may not be too many new releases available, but any movie collection that includes Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Hercules in New York, and Cheech & Chong's the Corsican Brothers is sure to have something for anyone and everyone.  There's no information on the site on how long it takes for movies to be released.  We'd assume it's sometime after DVD and VOD, but we don't know how long.  In time we expect this delay to get shorter and shorter.

The whole site is ad supported, so it's totally free to viewers.  You can watch whatever you want, as much as you want, whenever you want.  Occasionally you'll see a brief ad before a show or clip starts, then ads will be inserted throughout the video, but not nearly as many as you see on TV.  You can't fast forward through them.  For a 45 minute TV episode we saw 3-4 commercials.  Not a bad deal for the money.

What's the big deal?
First of all, streaming current TV shows on the Internet is pretty cool.  It isn't necessarily new, but it's one site with content from a ton of different sources.  You don't have to go to NBC's website for one show, then jump over to ABC, then to FOX and so on.  Just hook a computer up to the TV and you eliminate the need for a lot of what you pay a Satellite or Cable company for.

But it doesn't stop there.  Hulu has started to play with HD content.  There's an "HD Gallery" on the site that currently holds 20 movie trailers.  According to Eric Feng, chief technology officer of Hulu, each HD clip is encoded in full 720p. We weren't able to analyze it, but for online video it looked and sounded pretty darn good.  If it is 720p, and it's capable of Dolby Digital audio, it might start to make a pretty serious argument for web based television as an alternative to classic broadcast TV.

System Requirements for viewing HD videos at Hulu

• Flash Player 9.0.115.0
• 2.5Mbps Internet connection or greater
• Windows: Intel Pentium 4 3GHz processor (or equivalent), 128MB of RAM, 64MB of VRAM
• Macintosh: Intel Core Duo 1.83GHz or faster processor, 256MB of RAM, 64MB of VRAM
• Linux: Intel Pentium 4 3GHz processor (or equivalent), 128MB of RAM, 64MB of VRAM