Sunday, April 26, 2009

youtube v. hulu

I've never been crazy about youtube, I understand why people are, but it seems poorly designed and filled with trashy content.  Similarly to how I ended up feeling about myspace, too many advertisements and the content is poor.  

Youtube has many many videos of poor quality concerts that I've tried to sit through and just get disgusted at the crowd-noise and I'm always disappointed with my search results.  If I search for "David Cross" for example I get everything at the top usually with David Cross, but I also get everything with David and with Cross (many religious results here) the search doesn't seem to react to my use of quotes, to only get results with David and Cross. 

I struggle with determining who uses youtube, because to me its almost a humungous site of America's Funniest Home Videos, without the voiceover to make it mildly tolerable.  I sound like a gloomy-gus, but it is a site that is one of my pet peeves.

I truly appreciate the content that is under their shows tab because that is a rare opportunity to see free television show content that has a producer/writer/director... 

Which brings me to hulu.com which I have been in love with now for about six months and really enjoy the content, because I don't have cable so I can watch the daily show and colbert show in entirity here without being troubled by comedycentral.com breaking the show into clips.  Its very freeing and I could watch old episodes of WKRP in Cincinnati as well, and they have a few movies but they are mostly movies no one would ever want to watch.  

These are great steps for the internet and shows progress to what the possibilities of the internet can hold, I wonder if hulu was in the writer's strike agreement, I'm sure it was.

To teach with youtube can be a bit dicey I can imagine, creating a video is a fantastic way to learn about many things that go into the media, but posting it on youtube could end up in being a disappointment for the class or it could be very exciting... perhaps the school could schedule an assembly to watch the videos as a school, I think that would be much more rewarding overall.

I'll close this post with the ad for hulu.com with Alec Baldwin that aired during the super bowl and somewhat frequently afterwards:

3 comments:

  1. Cute clip from Hulu. If their agenda was YouTube's agenda, to provide TV anytime anywhere, people would be glued to their computer/TV screens. People would constantly be watching videos whereever they were, and it would be hard to have a normal conversation. Even if the video/show wasn't so good, people would still be interested in watching, to make sure to keep up with the latest episode. So I guess it's good that YouTube and Hulu have different agendas. For now, at least.

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  2. Have you checked out Vimeo, Jessie? (http://vimeo.com/) It's much prettier than YouTube, and it seems like the quality of videos you can find there is much better. (You can only upload videos you actually created yourself.) In my experience, you're much more likely to find a weird animated short there (http://vimeo.com/4209872) than someone getting hit in the nards (which is all I think of when someone says "America's Funniest Home Videos"). I like to use it to find videos of knitting techniques when I'm at a loss on a project.

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  3. Jessica, I haven't heard of vimeo! It looks great thank you for a new great thing!

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