Hulu

I was over at the NAB Show on Monday, and one of the booths I spent a good bit of time at was Adobe. They showed a demo of some kind of new flash web UI tool that was all drag and drop (no coding required) and that looked very cool. Web developers have it too easy.

But what impressed me a lot was the Flash Media Server 2.5 demo. They showed Hulu.com, which I had checked out about 6 months ago when they were in beta (and wasn't really impressed). It has come a long ways, and it is really quite cool now. It's literally TV on the internet. You can watch tv episodes and movies (uncut, apparently), and they splice in a few 15 second advertisements here and there. They've also got HD (you can get there by clicking the "HD Gallery" link at the very bottom of their page. I'm guessing NBC.com has done stuff LIKE this, but it's really nice to have a one stop shop. I want everything to be really easy, and Hulu makes it that way.

Ok, so Adobe was also doing some nifty stuff with H.264. Namely, streaming a live feed. Up until now, I didn't think it was possible to stream an H.264 flv if it wasn't closed for write (there are some header issues to deal with when the file is closed). I'd like to find out how they did that... More homework, I suppose.