Oh, thank God. It’s my number one complaint with Hulu and the sole reason why I canceled the subscription.
The new offering costs $12 per month, four dollars more than the existing Hulu service, which will remain available. However, seven prominent broadcast TV series including ABC’s “Scandal” and Fox’s “New Girl” will still be preceded by a 15-second preroll ad and followed by a 30-second post-roll ad.
Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins chalked up the exceptions to rights held by studios on select series. “They have other commitments that they couldn’t free them up for a complete commercial-free offering,” he said, adding that the service will clearly delineate the exceptions to users before they stream those series.
Other series that will have pre-roll include four ABC series: “How to Get Away with Murder,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Once Upon a Time,” “Agents of SHIELD,” and an NBC series, “Grimm.”
Will all shows be available anywhere I can use hulu, or are they still locking some devices out of some shows? Because that was always the most insane thing about hulu+ to me; having to watch Community (at the time) in a web browser instead of on my TV through the Xbox or Apple TV hulu app.
If they haven’t fixed that, it’s still a deal breaker.
Nope, but my experience was at least three years ago, and having poked around on the site now, I can’t find any indication that it still locks you out.
At the time, even though I had a paid account, and the hulu app was already on things like the obviously-not-mobile Xbox 360, shows could be locked out of “mobile”, which was literally any device that wasn’t a browser window on a computer. Looks like they got over that, which is good to know. Might be worth signing up for a month or two when I need to marathon something they have exclusively.
Now that it’s essentially ad-free, I would consider subscribing, if I hadn’t already found other solutions years ago when Hulu turned me off in the first place.
No some shows could only be watched on a PC though the web even if you had Plus. Annoyed me too along with the general fractured nature of the content. Some shows had a whole season some only last 5 episodes and other limiting crap because of the rights holders wanting to fuck with consumers. I’ll be sticking with Netflix and Prime.
Huzzah. I could not upgrade my plan fast enough. Watching the same commercial over and over through a single TV episode is like some crazy psychology experiment. “How long before he cracks?”
I haven’t run into the “some shows only on PC” problem in a while. The last show on which that was the case was 30 Rock. I haven’t run into anything else since that went off the air.
Yeah, Hulu could be entirely ad-free and half the new price, and they’d still have a hard time selling it to me. Netflix and Prime give me more than enough options as it is, when it comes down to it.
I’ll have to double check how their offering compares to Netflix, but it seems like there’s a significant non-overlapping library there and the only thing holding me back in theory was my deep, even pathological refusal to pay money for a service that is also selling my time to advertisers. (I stopped using Hulu’s free version long before Plus because of how terrible their actual ad library was. Also the point of cord cutting was not dealing with that bullshit anymore.)
I think you’re right. Netflix isn’t particularly strong on recent/current network stuff, which appears to be one of Hulu’s selling points.
refusal to pay money for a service that is also selling my time to advertisers.
A thousand times this. I recognize that people have blended subscription and advertising since forever. Back in the mists of time, there was a monthly magazine called Stereo Review that I subscribed to for about 7 bucks a year. Even back then I knew that the subscription price was so low because their ad rates were based on a mainly affluent readership, not 13 year-old paperboys with an inexplicable interest in hand-made tube amplifiers they could never afford.
We use Hulu + a lot more now that we have Chromecasts on all our TVs, and of course Netflix is a stable for us. Often we’ll use Hulu to catch up on missed episodes of a new show we just started watching and thus don’t have recorded.
I almost never use Amazon Prime Video just because I can’t use it on my Chromecast (obviously, they want you to use their Fire instead.)
