I have been using Hulu.com since November of 2007, when it was still in a beta testing phase, and there was very little content on the site compared to today. I have found Hulu.com to be one of the best free sites for streaming television and movie content on the internet.
PROS: It is as easy as creating an account and you are ready to go, watch any and all content that has been posted as available on the site. Leading networks FOX and NBC have put up a lot of current content such as Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader, The Simpsons, The Baby Borrowers, Heroes, and Fear Itself, and have also gone into archives providing some long lost favorite reruns like Arrested Development and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There is also a lot of content from other cable networks such as FX (30 Days, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia), Bravo (Flipping Out), PBS (NOVA), USA (Burn Notice) and Sci Fi (Ghost Hunters International). There is even content from Comedy Central with the Daily Show and The Colbert Report; current shows are available the day after they are aired.
There is a movie selection from studios such as MGM, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Lionsgate. New movies are added all the time, some of the movies are dated and campy, like Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, and some are considered some of the best films ever made such as Some Like it Hot.
Like with most regular television shows and movies on cable, all shows and movies come with commercials, the plus is that all commercials last only 15-30 seconds and then you are back to the content. This is really easy to get use to since most of us watch up to 5 minutes of commercials when we watch regular television and the advertising helps the content stay free.
Both the television shows and the movies are updated on a regular basis, old content comes down and new things go up, so you can always look forward to something new, or at least a rerun of an old favorite. You can use your RSS feeds to keep track of newly added shows and movies.
There are two ways to watch a show, you can watch it in the small screen and use the dimming feature to blacken what is around the picture, or you can use the full-screen mode that lessens the picture quality, but only a little.
You can also email the videos to friends, embed them on a webpage, and you can also share whole videos or clips and parts of videos on myspace, facebook, Windows Live, Digg, and other sites.
CONS: Some of the listings only have clips of shows or movies and no real content, but you can easily tell these by the icon to the left of the title; if there is a film reel next to the title of a film, there is a movie to watch; if there is a television icon next to the title of a TV show, there are actual episodes of a show to watch.
Not all content for new or old shows is available, so if you are looking for entire seasons of some shows you may not find what you are looking for. Most shows have whole seasons minus a few shows here and there, but in most cases shows are not complete. This leads to Hulu's marketing strategy, buy the episodes online, or whole seasons on DVD.
Some movies have been up since beta, with more being added, and others taken off, so the content is not permanent. Some of the movies use to have an option to watch them commercial free, but that option seems to have been eliminated. So now movies are not edited for content but they have the 15-30 second commercial interruptions.
OVERALL: Hulu.com easily gets 5 out of 5, for its ease of use, availability and choice of content, the short commercials, the high quality picture, and the fact that it is free. No, not every show or movie you might want to watch is available, but for free streaming content it just doesn't get much better than Hulu.