Hulu Desktop (available for Mac and Windows) seemed like a great idea when I heard about it earlier, so I’ve taken it for a test drive with some original Battlestar Galactica and found it to be better than the experience of watching through the browser.
How so? Firefox on Mac at least is riddled with issues involving Flash, seemingly randomly it slows down and locks up. With Hulu Desktop, the Flash instance is outside of Firefox and runs smoothly. On my Vista 64 desktop as depicted above, Hulu Desktop runs smoothly as well.
On both platforms there are various handy features missing, like an “always on top” option. As this is a beta product I’m not surprised that various features aren’t here, and Hulu says they will listen to customer feedback for fixing them.
There are a lot of people who would rather just download their television shows using Bit Torrent, I think Hulu Desktop is making it much easier to stay legal. You can hook this up with an HDTV and your mac mini or PC for a very good TV watching experience with software that is a billion times more responsive than the software on a Tivo.
