Hulu, The Experience, Part 1
Hulu, the joint venture site of NBC Universal and News Corporation's online video launched today. As listed on their blog, "Today we are excited to leave our private beta and open Hulu.com to everyone in the U.S."
So what is the Hulu experience? That depends on your expectations and starting point. I'm going to start with the technical experience since that is how I approached deconstructing the site.
The slide deck below (click on first slide), illustrates there is a fair amount of distance between the user and the media, 12 hops with an average of 168 ms in my ping test.
I emailed Jason kilar, CEO of Hulu to inquire if they are using edge servers or any form of P2P network (since they are good at moving large files) however, he did not respond.
Eric Feng, CTO of Hulu replied today, Saturday March 15th with the following comments:
1. "We are not using p2p. We use Akamai as our CDN to distribute our
vides. Akamai's technology does utilize edge servers to find servers in
close physical proximity to the user to reduce network latency."
2. "We are not encoding to VC1. We primarily encode using the On2 VP6 and
H.264 codecs. Our videos are all encoded at 480Kbps (512px by 288px)and
700Kbps (640px by 360px), but we also offer a select number of videos in
1.0Mbps (480p) and 2.5Mbps (720p)."
The speed tests I ran (East Coast, West Coast and that Middle part :-) at 6:00am shows my bandwidth is not constrained which has me wondering why the 1280x720 HD delivery would not play without stuttering? The smaller size (360 or 480p) played without any problems. According to that part of the site, Flash 9 and a 2.5MB connection are the minimum requirements; processor/memory is not an issue with my workstation and I used FireFox 2.0 in my tests.
(Click on slide below to advance deck)
