Hulu.com makes public debut on Wednesday

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Hulu.com was initially available for a limited audience on a test marketing basis. Out of those who've tested the service, they seem to be quite happy with it. Hulu.com will officially make the site available for everyone this Wednesday.

On launch date, Hulu will offer full-length episodes of more than 250 TV series from current hits as well as older shows. It will have “The Simpsons”, “The Office”, "Saturday Night Live", “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and many other shows.

Time Warner Inc’s Warner Bros. Television Group, Lionsgate and sports leagues programming will be available in addition to the Fox and NBC programming. Viacom and CBS corp. haven’t decided yet if they will join this group, but may join in the future.

Hulu will also provide about 100 full-length movies, including “The Big Lebowski” and “Mulholland Drive”.

The beta version shows an ad clip at the beginning of the program, and then the movie is commercial free. Most of videos come with embed codes, so web users can paste them on their websites just like YouTube clips.

For sports fans, Hulu will offer games and highlights from the NBA, and NHL. Details are not clear yet as to whether they will show full games or just the highlights.

Hulu is primarily launching this to compete with Youtube, giving studios more control over videos and advertising revenues. It remains to be seen if it will become as popular as YouTube, as YouTube offers more flexibility, tools, and has superior bandwidth-minimizing technology so videos always play fast.

In my testing of the Hulu beta, the quality of video was great but they didn’t have many new or good movies and TV shows such as Lost or The OFfice. As soon as they can get more video content up on the site, it could compete successfully with everyone in the industry.

Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said Hulu will be great for advertisers who want to target their ads to a specific group; it allos advertisers to put a suitable ad in front of the right person with their “self-selected targeting”. So far, Nissan, Best Buy and Unilever are on board as advertisers.

So what do you think: Will Hulu beat Youtube?