Hulu delights lazy people with new subscriptions feature
By Matt Jansen
Keeping track of new episodes of favorite shows can be a challenge, especially for anyone with eclectic interests and a lazy mouse arm (who wants to click more than they have to!). Hulu absolutely kept its lazy users in mind when it introduced the subscriptions feature, which is similar to the Tivo’s season pass.
It’s almost like creating a series of RSS feeds on Hulu that track your favorite shows and reduce the the amount of time it takes to find interesting material.
Here’s the intro fresh from Hulu:
Staying on top of your favorite shows is now easier with Hulu’s newly launched subscriptions option. Sign up for a Hulu account, and once you log in, we’ll offer the option to subscribe to full episodes and/or clips of any show on our site. Subscribe to full episodes of Family Guy or Battlestar Galactica, for example, and we’ll add new episodes of that show directly to your queue, whether it’s an episode that just aired on TV or an older episode that’s new to Hulu. You can find subscribe buttons underneath the artwork on any show page.
Hulu also throws in a smattering of additional pieces like a list of the most popular subscriptions and recently added shows pages. There’s also an option to receive automatic e-mail notification every time one of your subscriptions is updated.
This is a pretty slick addition to an already compelling site and it speaks to Hulu’s continued commitment to innovation. It should, and seems to be the company’s second top priority, right behind acquiring new shows.
It also will provide them with some new and valuable information on viewer habits, which could become another source of revenue.
Most importantly though, Hulu is remembering that above all, its users are lazy.
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Entry was posted
on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
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Read more entries by Matt Jansen.
Stumble It!
May 10th, 2008
Hulu’s so pervasive, you don’t even have to go to Hulu to see Hulu. You can watch on AOL, on YouTube, even on smaller sites like http://series.airwolf.tv/episodes (For Airwolf fans, for example).
So, we can all be even lazier and just stumble across Hulu through dumb luck!
June 27th, 2008
While Hulu does add shows to the queue, it doesn’t order them properly. For example, they recently added close to 100 episodes of Highlander to my queue, but they are all out of order. I figure it will take me over an hour to reorganize them with the Hulu queue management tools. It’s easier just to delete them and then re-add them in the correct order. Needless to say, this is a major, and very unnecessary, nuisance!