The most popular TV streaming service on the web, Hulu has rolled out Facebook features that turn the site into a social TV experience. And there’s an incentive to connect your Facebook account: you’ll receive a month of Hulu Plus for free. Here’s a quick demo video, and scroll below for our tour.
Once you connect your account, you can see an activity feed on the home page of what your friends are watching, recommending, favoriting and commenting. If you’re not excited about sharing your viewing history with your friends, you can jump into your privacy settings to make an adjustment. Keep in mind, if you watch Hulu on TV via Xbox or another box, your viewing history is shared, as well.
The coolest social feature is Facebook commenting. While watching a clip, when you comment, Hulu will share the clip beginning a bit before the time you commented — with a timestamp — to your Facebook wall. It also allows you to flag the comment as a spoiler.
Over on Facebook, it embeds the clip on your wall. If you’d like, you can rewind it to the beginning.
To get the most out of Hulu’s social features, you can “favorite” TV shows, which are reflected on your profile. Then as you browse shows, you’ll see the friends who have favorited them. The act of favoriting, by the way, doesn’t appear to trigger a Facebook “like” of the TV show.
But be warned, whenever you favorite a show, Hulu will share it on your Facebook wall unless you disable it on your privacy settings. This is our biggest complaint about Hulu+Facebook: every action, by default, shares to your wall. Before I knew it, I had 10 automated Facebook posts. Sorry, friends.
While Hulu shows what your friends are watching and recommending, it doesn’t appear (yet) to tie the data into Hulu’s own recommendation engine — a natural next step. And so far, the Facebook activity stream and recommendations only apply to Hulu.com proper. We’d love to see it expand to the Hulu iPad app and Hulu’s TV experiences, from Xbox to Roku. (Imagine receiving alerts for “friends watching this TV show,” for example, especially if they’re seamlessly tied to Facebook chat!) Because as Hulu CEO Jason Kilar has said, social media is a “game-changer” for TV.
Meanwhile, Netflix is working on its own Facebook integration, coming soon.