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I got hooked on iTunes TV shows last year, marathoning my way through Battlestar Galactica and then Lost. My TV-hating wife went from rolling her eyes to rolling up a chair to watch with me. But NBC has yanked the rug. My favorite shows of the moment — Galactica and the outstandingly witty 30 Rock — are no longer being added to iTunes. They're on Hulu, the new NBC/News Corp. site. I hate Hulu, for four very good reasons.

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  • Hulu video is notably grainier than iTunes. See screenshots. It looks terrible blown up to full-screen on anything bigger than a 15" laptop.
  • Hulu's player is much screwier than iTunes. "The following program is brought to you with limited commercial interruption by FILE NOT FOUND." "Firefox has blah blah blah give up."
  • I would gladly pay extra, as I did via Apple, to lose the idiotic commercials. An uninterrupted Battlestar episode, or two or three, is a darkly absorbing visit to another world. Not so on Hulu, where Best Buy disrupts the fabric of the show's alternate universe. Ditto for the sudden drop of 30 IQ points whenever 30 Rock pauses for a commercial.
  • The final insult: They don't have all the episodes I haven't seen. Why not? I'm serious. Dear Hulu publicists: Why not 30 Rock Season 2, Episode 1? Why only a few recent Galactica episodes and still not the new season opener I've been dying to see? Hit me at paul@valleywag.com.


Hulu, I'd be happy to give you my money, But give me my TV shows, and not in some missing-episode, ad-interrupted, low-res version in a bug-prone player. I sure wish I'd gotten in on writing the specs for this thing.