On the road with Hulu

I've been on the road this week, starting Sunday night during the Super Bowl. The good news was I managed to catch the second half in the Executive Lounge of the Hilton Boston Logan Airport, along with a few other road-weary folks. The bad news was I had to prematurely leave the Super Bowl party I was having with the family.

So the next day, I caught up with the boys via a Skype video call (in large part so I could see Mason, who had lost his second front tooth in as many weeks), and we swapped stories about our favorite ads. They're not completely into the football just yet, although to his credit, Mason knew the final score despite not staying up for the whole game.

When Sam and Mason were telling me about their favorites, I had missed every one of them, as I had been on the bus from the Cape to Boston. Hulu to the rescue!

(Full disclosure: My employer, News Corp., has a stake in Hulu, but as with all things CommuterDaddy, this represents my individual opinion, and not that of my employer.)

Their two favorites:





My favorite was the CareerBuilder ad, which is the only one during which I was LMAO:



As I was watching all that I had missed, I was struck by how many of the ads used work settings and situations as their backdrop or storyline. People looking back at the cultural time capsule for 2009 through the lens of the Super Bowl ads are going to be struck by how funny our collective work life is. Or maybe workers of the future will simply pity us. Hard to say at this point.

A word about Hulu: I am a bit late to the Hulu party, at least among some of my friends. But my interest and usage accelerated recently as I was able to catch up on episodes of Burn Notice that I had missed while I had been on the road the previous week. So Brandy and I queued up a couple of episodes after the kids went to bed Saturday night.

Here's been the challenge on the road: Watching Hulu in the evening means competing with all of the other business travelers for the hotel wifi's bandwidth. The videos, though buffered, take on a staccato quality as a result. It's not even worth trying to watch them at that point.

We didn't have this problem at home, of course, because when Brandy and I were both watching, my computer was the only on in use

I've had much more success on the road by consuming a little bit each morning -- when many of my fellow business travelers are still sleeping. When you're waking up at 5 a.m. in part to keep your body on an East Coast schedule, you don't have a lot of competition for the broadband pipe.

It's not likely that business travelers are Hulu's primary audience target, so a plea for improved buffering and streaming may not be easily heard in that context. I will say, though, that I would consume a whole lot more Hulu-based programming while I am on the road if that issue were to get solved.