I got out my iPhone and timed the seconds as they counted down during ad time on Hulu. Each second of ad time on Hulu took 1.34 seconds of actual time to pass. They were telling you for example, that there were 2 minutes of ads about to play, but the 120 second countdown would actually take 160 seconds to pass.
I stopped watching Hulu altogether after that discovery. I think I checked back in more recently and they had stopped doing that, but it's still a little telling about where their head is at regarding ads and their customers.
All around I'm disappointed to see content getting pushed farther down, to where several shows are now 41-42 minutes of content for an hour program, where it used to be closer to 48. I don't mind paying for content so much, but would rather not have to go to half a dozen places to get it... HBO, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon... what's next? I wouldn't mind paying the $50/month it costs combined if there was one place to watch everything ad-free.
I'm really surprised that Disney hadn't bought a stake in Netflix earlier on, as a lot of their family & children's content is very popular on the site.
Netflix gets it: I want to either watch the whole show from the beginning (not necessarily in a binge, but sometimes), or watch the first episode and stop. There is never a time where I think "Oh, let's watch episode 9 from season 3 from this show I've never watched before".
I have Netflix and Amazon Prime; is there a reason to add Hulu to the mix, at this point? Are there shows or movies on Hulu that I'm not getting from Netflix or Prime? I am becoming more and more disappointed in the selection at Netflix, even while their exclusive content has gotten better their movie selection has begun to suck. I'd really like it if there were a good movie service, like Netflix once was. Hulu obviously isn't that, of course.
Err, maybe because Hulu is literally owned by the incumbent television providers?
"... It is a subsidiary of Hulu, LLC, a joint venture of The Walt Disney Company,[8] 21st Century Fox, Comcast and as of 2016, Time Warner through their Disney-ABC Television Group, Fox Broadcasting Company, NBCUniversal Television Group and Turner divisions" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulu
If you want to watch currently airing shows on your own schedule, instead of when they actually air. If you only like to watch back catalogs, maybe it isn't for you. But you can't watch the very latest episodes of in-season shows on Netflix or Prime (for the most part).
Hulu is mostly a replacement for DVR/cable On Demand, not DVD box sets (although they do have a decent number of full runs these days).
Netflix has historically been my favorite of the available options; but their selection, particularly movies but also shows, has gotten pretty weak in recent years, so I always vaguely consider alternatives. But, mostly I just end up renting via Amazon Instant Video when it's something that Netflix and Prime don't have.
What's really needed is some consolidation. And I wouldn't mind seeing a service with a better ala cart model that's almost as much as buying DVD/BlueRay either.
Yes, each has a different set of back-catalog shows, Hulu has current-season shows from a number of networks, and all three outlets of exclusive, first-party content.
They also overlap significantly, so whether the marginal value of adding Hulu is justified is a question you'll have to answer yourself, but there is definitely stuff you won't have with the other two that you would by adding Hulu.
The one thing Hulu does better than Netflix and Prime is Anime. But CrunchyRoll has them beat there.
They offer it, but just like cable TV before it, the ad-free tier will go away as soon as somebody applies pressure on the bottom line.
> Hulu will still have advertising. The two current paid tiers — $7.99 a month with some ads and completely ad-free at $11.99 a month — are going to remain.
Think this a smart move on Hulu's part. And depending on the economics, potentially smart for Yahoo+Verizon too.
I than remember my IP being blocked by Hulu because I was running a Tor node. Before you say that sounds reasonable, it wasn't an exit node. And Tor provides methods to tell the diference.
I was forced to take the node down, because my brother wanted Hulu, and we live together.
Goodbye Hulu. Goodbye and good riddance. I know you think your customers will join your paid service. They won't. Most of your users are bound for either the richer streaming services, or PopcornTime and similar.
Way to make yourself less relevant.
They refused to validate the netflix model.
Even if it was a free service, I can't justify using it over literally any other streaming option out there, including on-demand where you can't fast forward through commercials.
One can not like ads, but have the expected total disutility experienced in Hulu-based ads on the $7.99 plan that would be avoided on the $11.99 be worth less than $4/month, in which case the rational choice would be to not upgrade to the ad-free tier.
> free, ad-supported version: you can't choose what to watch.
I may be wrong here, but why even call them by the same name?
I say all of this as a cord cutter myself. It took a while to figure out, but I was able to cobble together essentially every channel or show through legal means using Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Playstation Vue, HBONow and an OTA antennae. The costs savings only really worked out once my roommates and I all realized that each of us were paying for our own Netflix and HBONow subscription, but even without that, it's nearly the same price as our previous cable package (intro rate), plus has the luxury of being able to cancel each individual service should we decide to make any kind of change without having to go through the hell of Comcast customer service.
Also cutting cable cord doesn't really save you that much. In most cases you still need to buy internet access from your cable company which is hardly cheap.
If cable cutting becomes more widespread I expect cable companies to offer "discounted" cable channels with their Internet:
It's either $100/mo for 10mbps Internet + HBO or $99 for 10mbps Internet alone. HBO has been discounted to $1/month. What a great deal!
I signed up for Sling[0] for a free trial to watch the games. The annoying part is that the event I truly care about (Judo) is minimally covered on network television and at awkward hours.
Not entirely true if one doesn't mind a little grey area by SSH tunneling to your London, UK Linode and watching it on BBC. There was a good step-by-step post at http://bearsfightingbears.com/how-to-watch-the-olympics-live..., but it doesn't work for me anymore. It's what I did in 2012. Now I just don't care enough to bother. :-)
My spouse, thankfully, is about as big a fan of commercial television as I am, so it was easy sell to unhook DirecTV seven or eight years ago. Between Netflix, iTunes, and HBO Now, we have more TV than we have time to watch (again, not big watchers to begin with). When we sit down, it's with a purpose, not channel-flipping. That's not to say we're more noble than others, as we'll bing-watch a series with the best of them. We just don't sit down to "watch TV", we sit down to "watch Stranger Things".
Hulu? That was part of our cord-cutting way back when. But the commercials got more frequent, and long before Hulu wised up and offered "ad-free" we just quit watching it. Sorry, Hulu, inertia works both ways and we got used to doing without you, never to return.
And/or they do not have internet at their house, only use the internet on their phone.
"In response to feedback from our viewers, we started offering a commercial free experience on Hulu. For a small number of shows, however, we have not obtained the rights to stream commercial free and they are not included in our No Commercials plan. You can still easily access these shows with a short commercial before and after each episode with no interruptions during the episode. Specific shows that still have commercials accessible through the No Commercials plan will be noted throughout the signup, switching and playback experience. While the list of shows may change, they are currently: Grey’s Anatomy, Once Upon a Time, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Scandal, Grimm, New Girl, and How To Get Away With Murder."
It's seven shows, and even on those the ads are only at the beginning and end they don't interrupt the show. I say we cut them some slack.
I can't verify this for myself, because, although I'm a top-tier subscriber, I've never actually run across a Hulu commercial in the wild. Whichever shows those are, I guess I don't watch them.