hulu.com

Hulu
I've been playing with hulu.com the last few days.
It's a pretty neat free service that offers quite a bit of content (tv, full length movies) with pretty good quality though still flash based video. The ads aren't too annoying.
It's rather great. I did some bandwidth testing:

tv shows = .8mbps
480p full length movies = 1.3mbps
hd gallery 720p trailers = 5.4mbps

Nothing to install, nice full screen mode.

For HD (check out the HD gallery. Mostly movie trailers right now) I actually have to let it buffer up a bit before I start or my dsl can barely keep up.

Quality at 480p isn't bad. It's near dvd quality, a bit softer because of the much lower bitrate. 720p looks fantastic.

Netflix
I also finally gave netflix instant watch a try. Those are quite good too. I would say about as good as the 480p hulu stuff. Quite a bit of kids stuff and anime too.

I can definitely see how they can say blu-ray will probably be the last disc format. As bandwidth increases and codecs just keep getting better maybe someday we will approach HD disc quality (though we are still no where close today).

media center plugin (need to test this sometime)
http://www.anpark.com/Software.aspx