It’s free, I’ve never seen problems during high-demand offerings, it’s a joint venture between a couple of major companies so it is on the level, I think the user experience is great—the stream is very smooth and almost never has jerky starts and stops due to buffering issues (it had a few when it was in beta, but I think they fixed them). It is free, there are usually ads every 10 minutes, they last 30 seconds. I do not know how the inauguration will go because I’ve never watched anything live on it before, but everything else is wonderful.
If you create an account and log in, it will remember where you left off on a show and you can start from there or start over entirely.
The inauguration will be here: http://www.hulu.com/spotlight/obamapresidency
But I found out they would be streaming it by going to the front page and watching the stuff that scrolls through. You can watch entire tv shows and movies. They also have clips of many more shows. If you want to watch a show or movie, you can tell it to only list full episodes or movies (thus it removes anything it only has clips of). Lately I’ve been watching Arrested Development because it has all three seasons.
Hulu is less likely to have all the episodes of a current show, then it usually only has like every fifth episode and the most recent five or something. But it does have a lot of current shows. It also has Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog.
I like it.