First Impressions of the Cable Alternative

The first night worked out pretty good overall.  We took to the guide and set up series recordings for our favorite Thursday night shows (30 Rock, The Office, Hell's Kitchen) and my wife wanted to record Grey's Anatomy (which I am not watching).  Since we have a dual tv-tuner, we could record two shows at once, in high-definition.  

We still had a conflict for an hour of prime time TV during the 30 Rock / Office hour, so we opted to not record those two shows and watch them later on Hulu.  Hulu is an awesome service.  I'm on the Boxee windows alpha list right now, awaiting a build, so in the meantime I have to actually bring up a browser and go to http://www.hulu.com.

Hulu has been great for two reasons so far.  First, my wife can find full length shows (supported by advertising) to put on as noise, where before, she would have picked some random cable channel.  I think there is enough content there to keep her satisfied on that front.  Secondly, I started watching the Daily show regularly over the last week, where I had basically stopped watching it over the last year.  

As a side note, if you are thinking there are some channels that you can't live without (CNBC being an example), shows like "Mad Money" have full length, advertising free video podcasts posted.  As another example, we had HBO and all the shows we were watching had ended the new episode runs, except for Bill Maher's show.  I found out he also has a podcast with full length audio only episodes, which suits me just fine.

Pulling up the video podcast section of iTunes, I can wander through the "News & Politics" section and find full length episodes of "Meet the Press", MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow" show and "Countdown with Keith Olbermann".