So the entire purpose of my trying to do this was to catch up to the first few episodes of season 7 of the TV show Bones. Seasons 1-6 are on Netflix and I watched them over the past 6 or 9 months or so but in doing so, had missed the first 5 episodes of the present season of Bones. I never keep on top of actually running shows so I have no idea when their seasons run and whatnot... so anyway.
When I checked on Hulu, Season 7 episodes 2-5 were available for free, you had to subscribe to the pay service to get season 7 episode 1... so I signed up for that 7 day trial as well.
The only game console I have is the Wii - and none of my other electronics are set up to handle any sort of internet interface. We presently watch Netflix streaming through the Wii as well.
So now that we have all that info straight, here's my review to this point of the experience.
Installing PlayOn - pretty simple and straightforward. It has a password battery for you to save all your various logins to whatever content providers you might have, including hulu. So I plugged in my login ID and PW for hulu and was able to connect right away to the Wii. I followed the instructions
here to do that.
One thing of note - you must have IE 7 or higher for PlayOn to work apparently - not sure why, but I have a vast and burning hatred for IE and had long since removed it from my computer... I had to reinstall that as well last night... GRR...
Anyway... on to PlayOn and the Wii and Bones...
The interface with the Wii and PlayOn is actually very clumsy and difficult to use - probably has to do with the Wii controller and whatnot. I will go into detail here to explain how bad and clumsy the interface was, excuse the detail but it's hard to get the point across thoroughly without it.
The only "search" capacity you have is to select between predefined menu items "TV Shows" "Movies" etc. There is no free search alpha/numeric type search - it's like the very early days of netflix.
When you select the "TV Shows" menu, you get an alphabetical list, I selected "B" and there were 147 TV shows that started with "B". I had to scroll through them all to get to "Bones". The way I did this was to click on a little "down arrow" on the screen - there was no free scrolling, no use of the Wii controller's + and - buttons, no using the floating crossed arrow button - you had to hold the cursor on the little arrow and keep clicking the "A" button to scroll through each screen of titles - couldn't even just hold it and free sceroll... VERY cumbersome and annoying - it took maybe 15 clicks to get to "Bones" in the list.
Annoyingly - the first episode of season 7 was not offered in the list of episodes even though I had a trial subscription to Hulu - if you watch on your PC you have to subscribe to get episode 1, but episodes 2-5 are currently available free - I suppose they only keep so many episodes on the "free" list. Maybe it didn't update or maybe this was a product of my "trial" only membership to Hulu or maybe even the fact that I had a trial only of PlayOn - but either way - with my trial subscription to Hulu, I could watch episode 1, but I had to watch it on my desktop PC... lame.
Anyway, I then watched episodes 2 and 3 on the TV, streamed from Hulu, through PlayOn through my Wii. Image quality was just OK, not great, not as good as netflix streaming. There was some intermittent connectivity issues causing pixellation and whatnot and there was some jumping and low framerate issues - slide show type stuff but it was intermittent and the majority of the time spent was solid.
I could not get out of watching commercials which was annoying, but so be it I suppose.
All in all - I will probably ditch the sub to Hulu and may just do the one time purchase of PlayOn after I explore more of the content offerings in the next few days.
I will also be checking out Tversity that I linked above to see what it offers and whether or not the interface is any better.
In short:
Ease of setup of PlayOn - 4 out of 5 imo (5 out of 5 probably for those of you who don't have to reinstall IE)
Interface - 1.5 out of 5 (the lack of a free search option and the clumsy way it interacts with the Wii controller makes it terrible - they need to look at Netflix to see how a decent Wii interface works - and even that is only like 3.5 to 4 out of 5)
Image Quality - 3 out of 5 (a little sketchier than Neftlix which I would give a 4 out of 5)
Content Offering - can't say just yet, haven't looked at enough to tell - the lack of the ability to stream episode 1 to the TV annoys me but there are other details that may be the cause of that...
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If ignorance were painful, half the posters here would be on morphine drips.
Everyone playing WoW knows everything about playing two classes: 1) their own and 2) Hunters
ou guys need to stop dick riding wow and compare everything to it. It never invented a godamn thing, just made it popular. " -tinkly