Hulu is running short sponsorship announcements (:05ish) before show episodes, but not pre-rolls. “We think it’s a higher quality experience for users and advertisers alike,” said Jason Kilar, the former Amazon.com executive who is Hulu’s CEO. An average of two minutes of ads will appear inside a 30-minute episode, just not at the beginning. Hulu’s thinking mirrors Google’s recent research that discovered that pre-rolls are a poor user experience.
Also, following up from my earlier review of Hulu, I’m still very impressed with the site’s video quality. I watched a full-screen episode the other night, and it was the best streaming experience I’ve had — even beating Joost. BUT, BUT… the big caveat is that Hulu is still in private beta with very few users. It will be interesting to see if it can scale while retaining this level of quality and fast response.