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Microsoft will add Hulu Plus service to Xbox 360 on Friday, locking the premium on-demand video service behind its Xbox Live Gold paywall and shipping it in half-finished form.

When Microsoft launches the television- and movie-streaming service on its gaming console, only Xbox Live Gold members who pay the $60 yearly subscription fee will be able to use it. They’ll also have to subscribe to Hulu Plus at a cost of $8 a month. But for seven days, anyone with an Xbox 360 will be able to use the service to stream episodes of The Office, Modern Family, etc., as well as movies and other video content.

Wired.com has been trying out Hulu Plus on Xbox 360, and while it’s a cool feature to have, the implementation is as half-assed as the most recent Netflix update for the console. Despite Microsoft’s promises of a controller-free Kinect future, the motion controller can only be used to browse through a small selection of “popular” shows on Hulu Plus. You can’t search or even view your own queue unless you pick up your controller.

There’s also no search feature for Hulu’s catalog of clips, as I discovered when I tried to find a collection of the Saturday Night Live “What Up With That?” sketches. I eventually had to add them to my queue on my PC, and they were then viewable on the Xbox.

Apparently the Hulu Plus app already available for PlayStation 3 does let you search for clips, although I can’t check that myself right now for reasons that should be obvious. That said, PlayStation 3 users can use Hulu Plus for free and do a one-week trial any time they like — a better deal than Microsoft’s offer.

No matter what platform you view it on, Hulu Plus, while a paid subscription service, is still supported by advertising. So your favorite TV episodes will be broken up by frequent commercials.

Images courtesy Microsoft