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Hulu is eliminating its free, ad-supported streaming service
- allsystemsgo 10y agoCool, now if they could not show ads for their paid service, that'd be great.
- mark_l_watson 10y agoWe pay $12/month so Hulu diesn't show us ads. Really worth the extra money.
- hackerboos 10y agoThere are still ads on some shows even if you pay $12.
- hsod 10y agoIn case anyone was wondering, from https://help.hulu.com/articles/52427902#list https://help.hulu.com/articles/52427902#list "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.
- wonks 10y agocringes Well, I admit there are only a few things they don't have the full rights to, and they're shows I don't watch, but I still find this grating. They said "ad-free" and I pay for that. Not "almost ad-free".
- qbrass 10y agoSo they pull the content that they'd have to show ads on, and now you're complaining that the paid tier has less content than the free tier does.
- sparky_z 10y agoAccording to the news coverage I've read, those shows don't have "commercial breaks", they just have a single commercial at the beginning and end. Honestly, who cares? Just hit mute and sit quietly for 30 seconds. 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.
- mark_l_watson 10y agoYou are correct, new, hot TV shows have ads, unless you wait a while. I have only watched series that already ran s I have not experienced any commercials.
- JTon 10y agoApparently, that exists. From the article: > 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.
- dragonwriter 10y agoThey have an ad-free tier. Some people prefer to pay slightly less for the ad-full tier.
- serge2k 10y agoFor 11.99 you get that for all but a handful of shows, and they tell you exactly which shows when you sign up.
- jpmattia 10y ago> Cool, now if they could not show ads for their paid service, that'd be great. 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.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoIf they do, they'll lose a ton of their customers.
- ccvannorman 10y agoThey do and its exactly why i left them
- pacomerh 10y agoThats fine. The only option that makes sense to me is the highest plan. It's all or nothing
- kevin_b_er 10y agoSo you can PAY to see ads just like cable TV.
- dragonwriter 10y agoUnlike cable TV, you can pay more to not see ads.
- eikenberry 10y agoOr like most any magazine.
- chjohasbrouck 10y agoA couple years ago I was watching Hulu and noticed the ads always felt like they took much longer to play than they should. 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.
- cableshaft 10y agoHah! I always thought their second counter counted down kind of slow. Glad to have it confirmed. For several reasons I dislike Hulu and I haven't used their service for a few years now.
- CaptSpify 10y agoYoutube uses some magical time calculation as well. When I watch on my roku it says "you can skip this ad in 5 sec", it usually takes ~7-10 for it to pop-up.
- CaptSpify 10y agoI just timed this, and yes, it took 10 seconds for the 5-second skip to pop-up
- tracker1 10y agoI remember when Hulu first started, loved it, loved the idea.. at the time there was only one ad per adslot on shows, so the ratio of ads to content was much better. The down side was If you watched a few shows, you'd see the same ad about half the time, which got tiresome. 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.
- annieipr 10y agoDon't know why they still force you to watch commercials for anything that is on FOX even when you pay the upgrade.
- sparky_z 10y agoI bet that the original licensing deals had terms based on "share of ad revenue". They had to renegotiate all their contracts to offer the ad-free tier, and not all the content providers played ball.
- the_watcher 10y agoOnly if you are on the $7.99 plan. To me, if you're willing to pay $7.99 for Hulu, why wouldn't you pay $4 more to avoid ads (unless you really like ads, I guess)?
- dragonwriter 10y ago> To me, if you're willing to pay $7.99 for Hulu, why wouldn't you pay $4 more to avoid ads (unless you really like ads, I guess)? 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.
- profeta 10y ago> main product appeal: choose what to watch. > 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?
- erdevs 10y agoBetween Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBO Go, Showtime, etc on-demand services... what is left keeping people from cutting the cable TV cord? Just awareness and inertia? (Which are powerful, witness AOL dial-up ISP for a decade+.) Or are there other things keeping people tethered still? Sports? Reality TV series which don't all make it onto these on-demand services? Think this a smart move on Hulu's part. And depending on the economics, potentially smart for Yahoo+Verizon too.
- toxican 10y agoCheaper to bundle your internet with cable than to just have internet.
- the_watcher 10y agoIn intro rates, yes. Outside of that, absolutely not. Yes, you can shop around annually. Or you can pay about the same and have the ability to cancel and turn back on subscriptions you stop using or want to start again.
- hsod 10y agoLive events, for me. Primarily NFL/NBA/MLB games, but also things like live news coverage.
- continuations 10y agoSports is the big thing. 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!
- relaytheurgency 10y agoYou can get sports covered if you sign up for Playstation Vue. I have been off cable for several years, but had always missed ESPN/FS. Playstaiton Vue has fixed that for me.
- SwellJoe 10y agoHulu has always seemed like its primary goal is to serve the incumbent television providers, and not their viewers. I don't know if it's still this way, but when the paid version was first introduced, I tried it for a while, but they often only had the most recent season of a show. What am I supposed to do with that? Start watching a show at season 5? 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.
- teej 10y ago> Hulu has always seemed like its primary goal is to serve the incumbent television providers, and not their viewers 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulu
- hsod 10y ago> I have Netflix and Amazon Prime; is there a reason to add Hulu to the mix, at this point? 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).
- SwellJoe 10y ago
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoI remember when Hulu first launched. Hulu was the future. 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.
- imglorp 10y agoConsidering Hulu is owned by ABC, Fox, and Comcast, any optimism of a delighted customer would have been misplaced. They were basically competing against their own model and had every reason to make you miserable. They refused to validate the netflix model.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoSpeaking as a member of an area Comcast serves, they are the devil. They're actually worse than other ISPs. Somehow.
- thomasruns 10y agoHulu was amazing when it launched, but it's gone downhill ever since. The last couple of times I've tried it, they show more commercials than I'd see just watching the show live or on-demand. Plus it was a 1:1 relationship so if a show had 10 commercials, it was the same one repeated 10 times. 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.