My family watches a lot of Netflix on Xbox, and we were pleasantly surprised to wake up this morning to see Hulu Plus ready to go. After a quick download, we were watching TV shows in HD via our Xbox, yelling “Xbox play!” and “Xbox pause!” at our Kinect sensor to play and pause the clips.
Until now, we’ve watched Hulu Plus via our Samsung Blu Ray player, but it occasionally kicks the audio up an octave, making Tina Fey sound like a teenager on 30 Rock. Or, the audio is just woefully out of sync. Granted, we only watched one show on Hulu this morning, but the video and audio quality is significantly better — like watching a movie on Netflix.
The user interface is simple and easy to navigate. However, after waving my hands at the Kinect, I found it easier to use the Xbox controller to find a show.
Once a show is playing, voice controls rock. If the baby’s crying, we can jump up and yell “Xbox Pause” without fumbling for the controller. You can also fast-forward, rewind and skip ahead and behind.
We haven’t seen of our Xbox friends using the Hulu app yet, so it’s unclear if it has the same social alerting service as Netflix (“friends watching this movie.”)
