People like it when their technology works, especially when two devices work together. Conversely, if you plug your video camera into your TV expecting to play some clips for a party, and you then find that your TV shorted out your camera, you’re going to be pretty pissed. So it’s understandable that Hulu’s blocking of Boxee was quite the annoyance. Yet now we learn why Hulu was blocking another service that allowed users to play Hulu content on their televisions: Hulu was working on their own client, called Hulu Desktop. Update: You can download it here.
From the nifty video Hulu put together, it seems that the big feature that the desktop client has over the web interface is that users can create a queue (read: playlist) of Hulu videos. This is nice for the TV bingers who want to sit down and see all of those House episodes they missed in one sitting.
One question waiting to be answered is how the commericals in Hulu will work on the TV interface. As we’ve reported before, the new trend in cool for advertising on Hulu is to make the advertisements shorter, or to not show any ads at all. This may not be a feature of the desktop version as one would expect Hulu to want to standardize the content they pump out. 30 second commercials are the standard, so Hulu may be wary to show anything commerical free (save a President Obama address, of course).
