I’m a fan of watching TV over the Internet, so I was pleased to see that Hulu Plus has finally opened its door to anyone. After using it for the last few weeks, as a beta tester though, I’m not as happy with it as I had hoped to be. Darn it.
Part of that is that even with a 20Mbps cable connection and an optimized 802.11n link between my router, a Linksys Simultaneous Dual-N Band Wireless Router WRT610N and my Sony BDP-S570 Blu-ray Disc Player I’m still seeing latency and lag at times during evening TV prime time. I’m not surprised. After all, I predicted that this would happen.
You see, Netflix was already gobbling up a lot of bandwidth during those same hours. In all seriousness, that wasn’t leaving a lot of bandwidth for other bandwidth hungry video applications like Hulu Plus. As I’ve said before, there’s not enough last mile bandwidth for Google TV, Apple TV, and Roku’s bandwidth demands.