The new media site, featuring TV shows and movies from Fox,Warner, Sony and some other places, all legit and presented with fairly unobtrusive ads, is many steps closer to the realm of the ideal that has been offered of late on the internet.

Observations:

1) A very nice interface… slick, easy, intuitive, responsive. Positively Jobsian in its aesthetics and utility. There are a number of nice touches, like a background dimmer, and fairly quick full-screen switch.

2) The ads are not annoying, the way they are on the official NBC site. Right now, there’s a five-second voice-over ad before TV shows, and, in my experience, maybe two thirty-second interruptions in a half-hour episode. (Actually, they are 22-minute episodes, which underlines the improvement over TV, which offers about eight minutes of ads per half hour.)

3) The movie selection isn’t enormous but there are definitely good movies there, some of them rated R with very little to stop a kid from watching them. There is something weird about a major media portal that features the best American movie of the last ten years on its home page.

4) For now the clips (as opposed to the full shows) don’t have advertising; for clips, after they are done, a short ad appears in a small box, which can actually be stopped. Hulu seems to think it’s cheap to give folks thirty seconds of ad before two and a half minutes of clip, which you have to appreciate.

5) While the search engine is a little annoying, there are features like this alphabetical complete-on-one-page list of the TV shows available, which doesn’t force you to keep hitting a “next” button.

6) Congenially, the site offers embed code, which works for both full shows and even excerpts, which you can design for yourself in a slightly awkward but still impressive interface.

On the down side, moving around in a video you are watching is tricky; it’s easy to trip a wire that starts up a commercial, and once a commercial starts you’re frozen for 30 seconds.

Now all Fox and Warner have to do now is make it easy for me to watch it on my TV.