Hulu vs.YouTube

Keeley Motton
Olga Panova
Avery Merrifield

The show that we picked to watch on Hulu was the TV show Heroes on NBC. There were links to the Blackberry website and also to other recent episodes of Heroes. You can read the reviews of the episode you are watching and there is also a place to have discussions about the episode. The only ads for this page were for Blackberry. Right before the show began and all the commercial breaks were about Blackberry phones. There were options to embed the clip, watch it in high resolution, fast forward, and even lower the lighting. There is also a one line summary of the episode you are watching.

We went to YouTube and tried to look up Heroes or any full episodes of shows on NBC. It was really difficult to sift through all of the previews and parodies to find any full episodes of shows. We found a short clip of a Heroes episode that was posted by http://www.heroestv.com/. The only links on YouTube were to other clips related to the show but there were no ads or commercials. We noticed that you really need to know what you are looking for on YouTube because there is so much information there and it’s very cluttered. There are places for you to comment but the comments are less detailed than the discussion portion on Hulu.

One of the first advantages of Hulu that we noticed is how cohesive and organized it looked. Episodes and shows were very easy to find and the quality of the picture was really good. The site was so convenient and easy to navigate through. The downside of Hulu is that there is no real creativity and it is made mainly just for viewing. You can’t see the interpretation of the show through other’s eyes. YouTube is very unique and serves a different purpose than Hulu does. Hulu already exists so there doesn’t need to be a duplicate of the same site. YouTube is more personal and social and is made for people by people. The downside to YouTube is that it is near impossible to find what you are looking for if you aren’t really specific because there are so many clips. The picture isn’t always clear on some of the videos that are obviously home made and there is no option to better the definition. However, we feel that if you change YouTube too much it will alter the overall essence of what it was created for, a platform for individual expression.