One of the curses of a busy office job is not being able to find time to stay in shape. Here at our Los Angeles office, we try to break up late work nights with occasional ping-pong and foosball matches just to keep our muscles from atrophying. If only watching sports could burn as many calories as playing them. We’ve been adding a lot of content since we launched out of private beta, and one category we’ve focused on augmenting is sports.
We’ve added our first set of content from both the NBA and the NHL to our site, just in time to catch the last leg of their regular seasons. In a banner season for the NBA, with classic franchises like the Lakers and Celtics back as title contenders and star players swapping uniforms in blockbuster trades, you can keep up with daily happenings through NBA Daily Recaps, or you can get your fill of highlight reel plays through videos in the NBA 5-Star Plays and Top 10s sections. We’ve also just added our first few full-length classic games to the site, including Kobe Bryant’s 81-point game.
For hockey fans, we’ve added a variety of ways to keep up with the NHL. If you just want a quick periodic update, NHL’s Best of the Week highlights the week’s best assists, goals, saves, and hits. For those with more time, revisit some classic NHL games from this season or years past. We’ve also loaded our first batch of NHL player profiles, for those who are curious about what some of the players are like off the ice.
All this is in addition to the sports content we already had on our site, such as full length episodes of action sports shows like Firsthand and The 808 from Fuel TV and full length college football games like the epic Boise State-Oklahoma battle in the 2007 Tostitos Fiesta Bowl.
As with all of our content categories, this is just a baby step towards the type of selection we believe can find an audience online, but we’re always open to your feedback and thoughts.
Eugene (eugene.wei@hulu.com)
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Thanks for the feedback everyone. We don’t yet have a forum launched for these types of questions, but the best way to reach us with general feedback is through feedback@hulu.com which we monitor daily. If you have technical issues, for example with video playback, you can e-mail support@hulu.com. Most answers to common questions can be found at http://www.hulu.com/support. In the meantime, here are a few responses on questions posed here. To turn on closed captioning, look for the (cc) button next to the volume control in the player. It will appear if an episode has closed captioning available. We’re working to increase our closed captioning coverage. As for content additions, we’ve got an entire team working full-time just to acquire more episodes of content we have, and more new shows and movies that aren’t on the site at all. We can’t publish definite timelines for every show, but know that we try to get as much up as quickly as possible. We’ve also got updates coming down the road for the entire profile section which should address a lot of the questions here. Thanks for all the questions, and stay tuned.
Hi,
You all work hard, and you do a great job. It’s a great site, and great that it’s free. Thanks!
Keep up the good work!
I’ve noticed that on some shows you have episodes from several seasons, but some seasons are missing — Bones (FOX) for example has no episodes from season 2, will these be added? If so, when?
Bill – A lot of people have asked for closed-captioning, but I’ve only seen the feature on the newest episodes of “The Riches” and “Dirt”. Perhaps as shows come back from the strike this will change, but those are the only two places that I’ve seen functioning cc, thus far.
BTW – Hulu: I’ve been letting my kids watch some of the old shows. My preschooler loves “Emergency” and my daughter has been getting into “Bewitched”. It’d be really great, if there was some kind of “bookmark” system, so that I can pre-approve acceptable content.
Back when you were still in beta, they had to login through my profile and a bookmarking system wasn’t such a big deal, but now that we can create a profile for my kids, it’d be terrific if I could just pre-approve a list of shows, all at one time.
why is it such a pain to reorder items in the queue? i’d love it if hulu would take a cue from blockbuster.com on this one.
i also agree that it would be helpful to know when items are going to expire.
what happened to the feedback option?
and i’d love it if ratings became part of a member’s public profile (i.e. see that user’s highest-rated items)
keep up the good work!