For those of you who don’t know NBC Universal and News Corp. have taken all of their content off of YouTube and have decided to launch their own service. Before the new service’s launch some were calling it “Clown Co.” (those who thought it was a joke) and others were calling it “The YouTube Killer” (the ones who believed it to be a real threat to Google’s YouTube). Since then the site has launched in a private beta and it’s called Hulu.

I got sent a invitation to the private beta a while back but have been sitting on it waiting to have some time to really explore the service. Yesterday I spent some time on Hulu and I can honestly say I’m impressed and at the same time somewhat disappointed.

First let me start with what impressed me which would be the presentation. The site is slick and minimalistic. Unlike YouTube which is cluttered and has a million and one things going on on each page, Hulu keeps it simple with the actual video content itself taking center stage. Once you are watching you have a number of options such as getting a summary on the show you are watching, dimming the lights (making the the page surrounding the video darker), Giving feedback, and embedding the video on other sites. The embedding option in unique in the fact that you can either embed a whole show or choose to just embed a clip from that show. Making that clip as long or as short as you like. Overall I can’t think of anything I would have liked to have seen in the presentation area that isn’t there.

Now on to the part I’m disappointed with, the collection of content. Don’t get me wrong, even in its beta form Hulu has a ton of shows from the whole Fox and NBC Universal family of networks (USA, Sci-Fi, FX, ect.). However The amount of episodes for each program seem to be chosen at random. For instance with Family Guy I can watch two episodes from season 1 and five from season 6 and that’s it. Why can’t I watch every episode from every seasonor at least every episode from a single season? I’m hoping this is something that will be dealt with as the site comes out of beta because that would really suck for dramas that needed to be viewed in a sequential order.

Overall I’m pleasantly surprised with Hulu. Is it a YouTube killer? No, it’s not but I don’t think it needs to be. YouTube will continue to be the place for user-made video and Hulu will be the place for premium content. If Hulu can get Disney, Viacom and some of the other big players in television media on board it will be very successful. But for now I still can’t watch The Wire online .