Ad-free Hulu plan being offered

For me it depends. I don’t mind ads, especially if they’re somewhat targeted to the audience, but I do not want to be interrupted. I don’t care of an ad plays at the start of a YouTube video, just like I don’t care about previews at the start of a movie. I really hate them when they are a distraction/interruption, though, which is why I’ve despised Hulu and those obnoxious ads constantly being flashed on the bottom of the screen during TV shows. Ugh.

The repeated ads thing (jeez, they still have that problem so badly? Ouch) is because they can’t sell the inventory. They’d love to be selling the same variety of ads for Hulu that they are on Fox or NBC or whatever, but they don’t have the takers. House ads – ads for Hulu itself, in this case – are a total failure; every one represents a completely unsold ad block and a missed revenue opportunity.

Surprising that they haven’t dropped their rates if the inventory is still going that unsold. Could be they have licensing agreements that effectively set a floor for what they can charge because of other costs.

I hate ads at the start of a YouTube video because a huge amount of what I go to YouTube for are <10 minute short videos. Often just a couple minutes. So those ads constitute a significant fraction of the runtime and an obnoxiously long wait to get to some ephemeral experience. In front of an hour long TV episode or a movie it wouldn’t be a huge deal. Obnoxious, potentially, especially if poorly targeted (as Hulu ads have been), but much preferable to mid-run interruptions.

I genuinely have no use for ads in my life at all, and would be considerably happier if they just, you know, weren’t. Even the 30 second pre-roll ads on Youtube are phenomenally obnoxious. I’m here to watch a kitten play with string, dammit, I don’t care what the new Rav5 can do in rain conditions!

I may be very slightly exaggerating my position on this. May.


Relevancy isn’t even that big of an influence on my opinion. I feel like I do a pretty damned good job of informing myself of what I’m going to be interested in, either by researching it or relying on dependable recommendation engines (e.g., Qt3 for gamez). I can’t really think of the last time an ad influenced me positively to buy something I wouldn’t have otherwise (though plenty of ads have convinced me to avoid certain products wholesale), unless we’d like to count certain Lets Plays on Youtube as ads (and it seems some recent litigation from the FTC is leaning that way).

Several types of ads are completely unacceptable to me under any circumstances. Interstitials and ads covering part of the video fit that classification. Any site that does that stuff, I’ll block the ads. And obviously not pay them anything.

Hulu used to (or maybe still does, I don’t know) occasionally let you choose one of two longer ads to watch at the start of a show instead of shorter ads during the show. Sometimes, they were even movie trailers. Those I didn’t mind nearly as much.

My wife and I can recite the Daily Burn ads from beginning to end, doing imitations of the actors. Same with Airbnb and Menards. While it used to be almost entirely ads for Hulu itself, they do seem to have sold some ads. I think they are different in each local markets, because when I watched Hulu at my sister’s house in another state, the ads were all different.

I think of Twitch with this stuff, too (and, to a lesser extent, Youtube–if anyone in the online market has advertising clout right now, it’s GOOG). Twitch has been notorious for repetitive ads and completely empty fills in many common/populous regions for years, and AFAIK, the 18-24 Male Gamerswag market is supposed to be fairly lucrative (not as much as 30-something Moms, mind you, but who among us are as lucrative as that?!).

My Hulu usage has quadrupled since I upgraded.

Hulu may lose next-day streaming for shows.

Time Warner is reportedly looking to buy 25 percent of Hulu’s stock in an attempt to prevent the service from being able to stream current seasons of network and premium television. The company is concerned that having access to next-day streaming will only accelerate cord-cutting across the country.

Awww, just when I was starting to enjoy Hulu. I’ll drop it if that happens, that’s the main selling point for me.

I suspect this type of trend, and more limited offerings, will just get worse. See triggercut’s thread

Oh yeah, I mean this whole thing, like, everything about television is basically unsustainable. The old models won’t survive technology, the current “disruptive” models won’t survive on how cheap they are, etc. Just enjoying it while I can, and the longer I can before it all goes up in flames the better.

What is the point of Hulu without next day shows? If Time Warner is willing to take a $ loss equivalent to a 25% stake in Hulu, then the demise of the pick and choose model is closer than I thought.

Losing recent episodes would likely kill or marginalize Hulu.

Which Time Warner would love.

Sigh.

It really would, which is why they are trying to pick up discarded shows like the Money Project. I could see hulu grabbing Galavant as well.

Yeah, but the difference is, without current shows, I can just subscribe to Hulu for a month and watch their awesome shows like the Mindy Project during that month, and then suspend my membership again for 6 months, etc. Without current shows, there’s no reason to have an active membership throughout the year.

They think they’d love it, because they’re a bunch of myopic twats with short memories. Right now, cable is competing with streaming services. Before Hulu+ and Netflix and iTunes and Amazon, it competed with pirates. If content owners castrate the streaming services, cord-cutters won’t return to cable-- most will immediately return to piracy.

There are some fine points to this; Time-Warner is trying to kill Hulu+/Netflix/etc with their own streaming service, so they retain complete control and eliminate their competition one fell swoop. But of course that service is from Time-Warner Cable so it sucks balls.

Time-Warner cable is in the process of merging with Charter, so I wonder if Charter is on board with this as well? Charter made the play for TWC so its Charter management taking over if the FCC approves the deal, which looks likely.

So, I don’t remember seeing this announced anywhere, but I just visited Hulu’s site and…there is no free version of Hulu anymore. You can either pay $8/mo for ad-laden Hulu, $12/mo for no-ads Hulu, or of course pay another $9/mo for Showtime content on top of that. I don’t know if they’re still calling it Plus since there’s no other version to distinguish it from. It does appear to still offer same/next day streaming on some shows. Kind of a big change. Also seems pretty fucking ballsy to charge more than Netflix for a service that never struck me as having as much to offer (they don’t have the Criterion Collection anymore as far as I know, which was one of their few unique selling points), but I was never a heavy user because I hated the ads so much.

Yep, free Hulu is gone. They licensed all that content to Yahoo before they shitcanned Marissa Meyer.