[thwarted]

"Hulu is designed specifically for viewing "professional" content. That means that the focus of the site's layout becomes geared not towards usability, but towards aesthetic."

It's too bad that one can't seem to have both "professional" and "usable". I rank them like this in terms of preference:

  1. usable and aesthetic
  2. usable
  3. aesthetic

"However, when you're adding dynamic content, it's too much of a bother to generate an image for each new item."

Then specify Futura in the CSS rules with a fallback, or don't insist on the use of a font that isn't reasonably reliable to be on everyone's machine. Let's use an interpreted VM to duplicate capabilities (text rendering) that the platform (the browser) already does natively. I mean, we have fast processors right? Every one of these is additional embedded objects potentially hampers the smooth viewing of the focus content: the video.

If the display around the video matters to not get in the way, then you should be distributing extremely high quality files that people can watch full screen using the video viewer of their choice without the risk of latency issues. The fact is is that hulu is, by definition, a low definition distribution platform for quick consumption. While it does have features that succeed in this area, and it does have a different focus than youtube, it has just as many issues (and benefits) as every other interface.