Hulu broadcasts all the stuff NBC and Fox make (plus universal/fox subsidiaries, for example Fox makes FX and Universal puts out SciFi).
It is not a channel, it is on demand. If you pick Bones, for instance, you can watch any of the episodes in the most recent season plus a few from past seasons. You can watch older programs too, for instance a few seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the A team and others are choices.
Basically you pick Hulu or CBS or whatever, then you pick a show, then you pick an episode (it has picture previews for each show) and then it plays on the TV. So if I want to watch Numb3rs on CBS I just pick an episode and it starts from the begining of it.
As to cost Hulu and others are free because they use very limited ads. Basically it plays one commercial that is usually 15 seconds where the normal on TV program would have 6 or 7 commercials. Probably around 5 15-30 second commercials in a hour long show.
To the cost of the program, it is a one time 30 dollar fee if you want to keep it. The 30-60 day trial is free. It is still in beta so it isn't perfect (some youtube videos don't work for me, for instance) but it DOES work and will only get better. Between this and the ability to play DIVX over my network the PS3 has become more or less the only media device I need. It's like a blu ray player, a media server, an apple TV (you can download/play movies and TV shows legally from the PSN store) and a game console all in one.
Pretty great overall :D.
All the above applies to the 360 as well, except the interface isn't as good. By that I mean the 360 uses certain kind of strange protocols for example it alphabatizes EVERYTHING no matter what and so the lists are a bit weird among other things. It still works though, I've tried it on both PS3 and 360. It just works a bit better on the PS3.
PSN ID: ChosenOne feel free to add me
