Hulu, the premium YouTube

These days, there are hundreds of ways to watch videos online. From YouTube to iTunes to FloTV on your cell phone, the internet has opened up the doors to a video free for all. While there are millions of videos available online, sometimes it can be hard to weed out the crap from the good stuff. Sites like YouTube are polluted with poor quality user-submitted videos or catch-them-while-they-last clips from your favorite TV shows, which are often pulled from the site for copyright infringement before you can even copy the embed code to your blog.

That’s where Hulu.com comes in.

This streaming video site, co-owned by NBC Universal and News Corp., offers high-quality content from hundreds of your favorite movies and TV shows and you never have to spend a penny because the site is supported through 30-second ads that run during the video. Hulu’s CEO Jason Keller explained in a recent Entertainment Weekly interview that Hulu’s focus is on premium content saying, ‘The resolution and size of the video are things that put Hulu in a very different class of service than YouTube.”

Certainly, Hulu offers superior quality video to YouTube, with a full-screen mode that doesn’t look pixelated or choppy. It also offers quality content and eliminates the task of wading through poor production value user uploads to try to find a decent clip.

Best of all, Hulu doesn’t just bring you a bunch of clips, you can watch full episodes of shows like 30 Rock or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and enjoy full-length movies. Titles available include Some Like it Hot, Sideways, Requiem for a Dream, and The Big Lebowski to name a few. The site has about 250 shows and 100 movies with plans to add more as they work out deals with other networks and studios.

While the movie aspect is appealing, it’s the TV section that’s really useful. Hulu is like a universal TiVo and you can catch up on episodes or entire seasons of some really great shows without paying a dime. Can’t remember what’s been happening with the Malloy family, the gang of con artists on The Riches? Well, Hulu has all 13 episodes of the first season available at the click of a mouse. It takes all the stress out of trying to pick what to squeeze into your TiVo Season Pass list because you’ve always got Hulu as your TV safety net.

It’s doubtful that Hulu will replace regular TV anytime soon; the experience of watching something on a little laptop screen just doesn’t compare to watching it on a brand new plasma TV, but it could become another channel, so to speak, for video content.