As a Colbert Report fan I decided to compare the players on Comedy Central and Hulu while watching the full episodes. The full episodes are a fairly recent addition to the sites.
With Comedy Central there was of course a 15-second commercial at the beginning that you can’t skip through. In some ways ads on streaming media might be more effective because you can’t skip through them – at least not that I know of yet – and as long as they keep them short people are unlikely to get up and go do something else while waiting for the commercial to finish. I suppose you could “channel surf” by going to another site, but it’s not really worth it for 15 or 20 seconds.
On Comedy Central I had the option to switch from high quality or auto to low quality when I right-clicked on the video or on the settings menu. The low quality was noticeably different, but if I had to choose between that and constant buffering I would definitely choose the low quality.
In full screen mode, the video is understandably distorted, but it’s nice to be able to watch the video on the entire screen. In the menu items, there are several options you can go to that allow you to change the quality settings, share the video url using facebook, digg and other social sites and also episode info – all while the video continues to run.
Commercials were in the same spot where commercials would normally be, but they were only 20 seconds instead of a couple minutes like they would be on cable. Overall, I was very impressed with Comedy Central’s player and user interface. The video-watching experience was very enjoyable.
Hulu also has full episodes. Instead of four options for video quality (low, medium, high, auto) there are two: standard def and high def. I did have some buffering problems even in standard def so I wish there was a lower resolution I could watch in. To see the details of the Colbert Report, the movie actually stops, which some people might like though I prefer that the movie keep playing.
Both players allow you to skip forward and rewind (though you might have to watch the 20-second ad first – or again). Want to hear the Rush performance again? Just rewind the stream.
With Hulu’s high-def settings the audio quality is also better than in standard def. The Comedy Central player doesn’t seem to have a difference in audio quality between settings. I would have liked to listen to the Rush performance in a little higher quality sound than what Comedy Central gave me.
