YouTube or Hulu?

Lindsey Abel

Brandon Arnold
Kathy Bowman
Shawn Blair

Hulu.com is a very convenient website to catch up on any episodes you may have missed of your favorite TV shows as well as a great website to explore new shows or clips. Unlike YouTube.com, Hulu is very easy to navigate because of its streamlined front page. Once you find a click on a show you want to watch, like "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," it takes you to a page where you can find any episode or clip arranged by the most popular, most recent, or highest rated. So even if you aren't familiar with a show, you can start with an episode that everyone else thinks is the best and go from there. 

Once you choose a show to watch, an aesthetically pleasing viewing window comes up with many options around the screen. You can choose to watch it in high-res, full screen or with all of the lights dimmed around the window, opened up in a new window, or you can choose to embed the clip or show or e-mail it to friends.

After you've seen the show, you can read what other people thought about it or even read and contribute to discussion boards about the show. This is also a great feature because you find out some pretty interesting trivia about the shows that you may have not known before.

Hulu's hook is their convenient, attractive layout and high quality clips and shows that are easy to find. You don't have to worry about the unwanted clutter of people's video responses or amateur renditions of every joke in the show. There are short commercials embedded in each show, but we think it's a fair trade to watch free, high quality shows. 

YouTube, on the other hand, serves only a very limited purpose: it is a place for people to view clips of almost anything. All you need to do is type a topic in the search bar and you will find a hundred people telling you more about it. The channels are fun to browse through, and you can always see what the most popular video of the day, week, month, or forever is (right now it's a toss-up between Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" video or that guy's "Evolution of Dance," which no one understands why it's so big). Either way, it's reassuring to know that if you need to waste a few hours, you can either learn something about science and technology or watch the coolest things on the web according to YouTube viewers.

Other than that, there isn't much of a use for YouTube. The site itself is cluttered and sloppy, and it isn't very easy to navigate through. Some of us do have videos posted on YouTube (which will remain nameless due to their content ), and it's nice that you can put anything up for my friends or whoever to view. But it's almost impossible to find anything cool that has to do with shows like Always Sunny. All we found were a lot of low quality clips from the show or the seasons' special features from the DVD.

We did find an interesting clip for Always Sunny fans posted by Maxim Magazine, but the ones posted by random fans were lame. There aren't any commercials to interrupt what you're watching, but who cares when you only have two minute clips from random shows instead of full episodes? If we want to watch clips for a laugh, we're going to Hulu. 

"Charlie Bit My Finger" is really hilarious, though... It changed lives. 

YouTube needs to be more like Hulu, but it never could. The only way advertisers can advertise with such short clips on YouTube is by simply cluttering up the page with images. Hulu gets people sucked into shows and then forces them to watch 30 second spots but at least the site is more professional. There is just too much random content on YouTube to control it, but such is the price of freedom.