It’s new feature Tuesday for “Hulu for the Holidays“, the JCPenny-sponsored event that has Hulu adding something new each day through the holiday season. On Mondays they add new TV shows. Tuesdays its new site features, and Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays are for new movies.
This week’s new features are a buffer progress bar and full screen embeds. The buffer bar is something you see when you pause a video. It’s a pretty self-explanatory feature that you can see in the image below. Hulu notes that due to legal reasons, Hulu doesn’t buffer more than a small portion of the video at a given time.
The second feature allows you to watch the full-screen version of any video that is embedded on a site, directly from that site. Frankly, I don’t know why this feature wasn’t available before, but I welcome its addition.
I’ve been covering the other features, although I think I missed the first one, which was the Hulu for the Holidays Widget:
But besides that, they have so far released new actor search and video description features, and recommendations and closed caption location ones. I’m glad to see that they keep adding features that make the site more usable and convenient. Hopefully they will not stop doing this regularly once the Holidays have come and gone. In fact, they illustrate a pretty good model for any site: add one feature a week that improves the user experience. How much more enjoyable would the web be if everyone did that?
