So, I haven't used hulu since early December. Used to be smooth at full screen. Now its jerky, even at the small screen. So what gives

Watching SG-1 Season 10 : Ep. 20
I also noticed on the 'Network Monitoring' that there are large gaps in the upload download with the sending/receiving regularly dropping to 0B/s
Speedtest.net gives me:-
Ping 124ms
Download - 9.86Mb/s
Upload - 0.93Mb/s
uname -a
Linux localhost 2.6.26.8.tex3 #1 SMP Mon Jan 12 04:33:38 CST 2009 i686 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8400 @ 2.26GHz GNU/Linux
top - 19:31:50 up 1:07, 1 user, load average: 0.72, 0.94, 0.60
Tasks: 131 total, 2 running, 127 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 33.8%us, 1.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 63.4%id, 0.0%wa, 0.8%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 3103324k total, 769148k used, 2334176k free, 34096k buffers
Swap: 4088500k total, 0k used, 4088500k free, 456712k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
8112 marrandy 20 0 386m 139m 34m S 66 4.6 4:10.58 firefox
8011 marrandy 20 0 40004 18m 14m S 3 0.6 0:02.44 konsole
5875 root 20 0 370m 30m 10m S 3 1.0 4:14.67 X
Update
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
8112 marrandy 20 0 516m 222m 37m R 59 7.3 14:11.33 firefox
5875 root 20 0 389m 32m 11m S 25 1.1 6:27.88 X