This will sound like I'm playing devil's advocate, but it's a serious question. Hulu Plus theoretically works an awful lot like a DVR from your cable/satellite

This will sound like I'm playing devil's advocate, but it's a serious question. Hulu Plus theoretically works an awful lot like a DVR from your cable/satellite company (we'll come back to the "theoretically" in a moment): watch new shows the day after they aired, as many as you want. Plus a lot of back catalog stuff, plus weird independent stuff that they bring in. Not for cable or satellite prices of $100+ a month (and that's not counting "premium" channels like HBO), not even for the promotional special prices of ~$30 a month, but for $7.99 a month, and with about half as many ads, given that Hulu's breaks are 60-90 seconds instead of 2-4 minutes. I don't know. On the surface, isn't that kind of an amazing improvement? Coming back to the "theoretically," the problems I see with Hulu are certainly driven by stupid contractual obligations: they usually only have the last five episodes of any given series, so if you want to start watching something halfway through the season you're out of luck; they sometimes don't have rights to stream things on Hulu Plus that they do on normal Hulu, which is banana crazypants; and of course, there are shows and even whole networks they don't carry. But out of all the issues with Hulu, I'm not sure their failure to give us everything commercial free is actually that outrageous.