With

Hulu

, you can

watch video and TV shows online for free

. While you don't need an account to watch some of the content on

Hulu

, having your own

Hulu account

allows you to

customize the Hulu experience

and gives access to video content that non-account holders can't watch.

Hulu

has a ton of

free movies, videos and TV shows

available. With the sheer amount of content on Hulu though, it pays to use the

advanced search

functionality of the site. Molly McDonald shows us how to

find exactly what we're looking for on Hulu

.

In addition to its reasonably powerful search that helps you sort through all of the content on

Hulu

to pinpoint what you're looking for, you can also

subscribe to your favorite shows

once you've found them. By

subscribing to a show

, you'll never miss an episode again!

The

Hulu player

is a powerful way to

watch free TV and movies on Hulu

. It has some neat advanced features too: you can dim the lights, darkening the site so that the video player is easier to focus on, you can pop-out a video player to watch even if you navigate away from Hulu.com. You can even

embed Hulu video on your site or blog

Watching TV can be a social affair. We discuss yesterday's episode of a popular reality show around the water cooler, ask friends and co-workers if they saw last night's episode of a given police drama. So it is that you can

find friends and have similar interactions

with them on

Hulu

. Molly McDonald explains.

Like specialty channels on cable or satellite TV service,

Hulu

offers a series of

channels

. Channels are the place to look for the content that most interests you. Inside a channel, you can filter to only see full episodes, only feature-length movies and more.

Channels

are the best way to find what you want to watch on Hulu.

Like channel surfing on your old school TV,

Hulu

offers several options for visitors who don't know exactly what they want to watch; they just know they want to watch something. The Most Popular tab shows the most watched videos of the day, the week, the month and even of all-time. With so many ways to access the world of content on Hulu, you're sure to

find something to watch

.

With

Hulu

, you can

share a lot of information about yourself

, your interests, your favorite TV shows and movies, or you can choose to share very little. On your

profile settings

page, you can also set how you'd like to watch video. For example, you can set Hulu to always display English language closed captions when available, you can set Hulu to remind you when a new episode of your favorite show is released and much more.

Hulu

keeps a log of all the shows and movies you've watched when signed into your account. You can choose to rate shows on a five-star scale to tell Hulu your favorites and least favorites.

Hulu then learns about you

, compares the shows you like with the shows other

like-minded Hulu users

have enjoyed and makes more targeted recommendations for Hulu shows you may like.

Whether it's a favorite genre, a favorite actor or actress, a favorite category or theme, you'll want to look at

Hulu Collections

. These are online

show packages

that contain a common theme. For example, get Saturday Night Live episodes with a certain star or guest star, get documentaries that relate to space travel, find cartoons with a common theme and much more.

Molly McDonald takes a close look at hulu, the online service that lets you

watch TV shows and movies online for free

. She leads us through

signing up for a free hulu account

to

finding TV shows and movies online with hulu

, joining in with the hulu community and all steps in between.