As someone who’s currently cut the cord (only until we find a new house I think, though) I agree with all this - I recently subbed to Hulu in addition to Netflix. Between the two of them I’ve got most everything covered. And using a Chromecast to stream stuff I also don’t use Amazon (I’m tempted to get a Roku box but have not succumbed yet).
I have not upgraded my Hulu sub yet because tell the truth, the ads don’t bother me that much. They’re easy enough to just ignore or mute. Yeah, it’s a slight PITA but nothing I can’t endure. Though I’m sympathetic to the people who object on philosophical grounds to seeing ads in a service they’re paying for (hello… cable tv!).
And on a different note, the grammar nazi in me wants to point out that you probably mean “staple” instead of “stable” Jeff.
Hulu ads have infuriated me from the get-go. I’ll subscribe now that I have the option of removing adds (a pre-roll doesn’t really bother me, just don’t interrupt my damn show… with the same three commercials over and over and over and…)
I refuse to pay for commercials. It breaks the social contract. Free=commercials, paid=no commercials, period. So with this change, Hulu is finally at least a consideration for me.
I dont mind the commercials, and although I like netflix, the shows on hulu are more recent and probably more costly to provide and still charge the same rate as netflix.
Also the kids shows dont seem to have ads at all.
Maybe they’re more costly, but that’s why you charge more for an ad-free plan (as they are, finally, doing). I’m more willing to pay $12 for no ads than $8 for ads, by several orders of magnitude, and it made no sense at all to me that they dragged their heels so hard about doing that.
Yep, that’s what I get for posting from my iPhone and not checking autocorrect. ;)
I’ve actually got a Roku 3 and an Amazon Fire stick. But we just plugged in Chromecasts into all 3 of our TVs (den, bedroom, sunroom) and are happy. So many apps use Chromecast (except for Amazon Prime, of course, which again is why we almost never use it.)
My problem with Hulu is most of the stuff on it is not complete.
If i can only watch the last few episodes of a tv show, it is not that much better than cable for me. It always pisses me off when i open up some tv show i want to watch and find out only season 6 is there. To me the ideal of streaming is to just be able to watch stuff on MY schedule completely, without worrying about when it aired (if it already aired of course).
That’s actually going to end up being a problem for us as viewers. As companies realize fewer and fewer people are watching their ads, they are going to be less willing to pay the networks for advertising time. From what I’ve read, this has already become an issue for numerous networks.
And since they rely on that money to fund their operations, shows, etc. they have to find a way to get ads in that we can’t avoid. And we REALLY aren’t going to like those.
I’m OK with the ads that are inserted into shows via placement. Rizolli and Ailse (sp) have made it a running joke - they always have one scene in which a cast member does something that demonstrates a feature of a Toyota. In the last episode, a detective gets in the car with another detective, and the one starts to show him how she can charge his phone by laying it in a charging tray in the car, and before she finishes he says “Enough with the car features, get going, we have a murderer to catch” or somthing like that.
BUT I fear what we will be seeing before long is, during a show, the bottom 1/4 to 1/3 showing scrolling ads. I already hate it when networks have ads for future episodes of something at the bottom of the screen. It is intrusive and irritating. Before long we’ll be seeing ads for products on the screen during a show. They WILL find a way to make us watch the commercials. Their business models depend on it.
Community had a lot of fun with product placement. Which can work, but only for long.
There is a running debate going on with the newest version of iOS allowing apps that can block all third party stuff. Ad blocking is cause us to lose a lot of media and news sites in the near future. I just started using U block origin, and I am looking for a way to limit it to flash based ads and keep running banner ads, like we have here at quarter to three.
I paid the extra $4 per month to get rid of the ads. If Hulu had a decent number of ads in its rotation, I probably wouldn’t have paid, but seeing the same ad over and over was torture.
The reason I love Hulu is because it has current shows, even daily shows like @midnight that Netflix and Amazon don’t have. Watching those a year or more later would miss the point.
Apparently new versions of Chrome have updated the built-in Youtube “app” to run-around AdBlock on Youtube. For now, you can fix that by disabling the Chrome app, but it’s probably just the beginning of a new phase of the Ad Wars.
I’d really rather just pay people I trust to make things I like, Netflix-style. The whole advertising-operated economy kinda weirds me out.
. . . says the guy who’d be real sad if Google suddenly went under and his Android OS phone started sucking.
