Yesterday on Hulu I thought I’d found the jackpot as a political junkie: A show called Race to the White House by CNN, narrated by Kevin Spacey that in each of 6 episodes went over famous races throughout American History.
Unfortunately, watching the first episode of Nixon vs JFK was pretty boring. I guess I should have known CNN couldn’t make a show as interesting as a Ken Burns documentary, which is sort of what I was expecting, with lots of facts I didn’t know, or lots of talking heads with interesting factoids and analysis and insights. Instead they had 3 talking heads, maybe 4. Two from the Nixon campaign, one from JFK’s, and one reporter.
I don’t think I’ll be watching the other five episodes. It’s a shame. It’s a great idea for a show during a Presidential campaign. But poor execution.
They scrapped Yahoo Screen, which was their own go at it. Yahoo View is literally licensed Hulu. Obviously a terrible investment, but Marissa signed the contract before her exit.
I signed up for ad-free Hulu for a month and thought it was okay at best. Unlike Netflix there were still interruptions, like ads for other Hulu things at the top of a show. I eventually decided against continuing it for a variety of reasons, so I cancelled it and immediately lost access, they didn’t even let me finish off that last week. Fucking dumb. Also a few of the shows I wanted to watch didn’t qualify for the ad-free stuff, so there were still ads. I’m not subscribing to Hulu again, I’ll stick with Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Hulu’s raison d’etre was simply to offer a legitimate free alternative to piracy. The free option is now gone. Pirates are kinda notorious for not really being into paying for stuff.
Of the two paid options, one shows tons of ads, offering an inferior experience to your cable company’s DVR. This is why I never paid for Hulu-- I will never pay to see advertising. Ever. The other paid option, recently released and marketed as ad-free, stunningly still shows ads too.
Shitshow all around, really.
Why is Netflix successful? Because it does exactly what you expect. You pay your $whatever per month and you can watch whatever you want, all-inclusive, no ads. There’s a reason why people love Netflix and hate Hulu.
I am thinking about dumping Hulu now as well, the criterion collection is gone, and I basically use the service for stuff that I forget to DVR.
I haven’t really seen any ads with the ad free service. I don’t really know what people are seeing as far as ads go, but a lot of the ads on Hulu plus plus are probably due to deals with the networks themselves, and 100% of the time those ads are for other shows, and run pre-roll. Not too dissimilar to what HBO Go does, though you can fast forward through those easily.
Hulu+ has JUST enough content to keep me subscribed, the fact that they have anime subs of current shows makes the case for me, and Seinfeld.
I’m on Hulu mainly for the Cartoons and for the ABC shows, since I don’t have cable. I’ve got the ad tier, but Hulu doesn’t show ads on their kids programming, which is really cool, and the ads they do have are usually much shorter or more interesting then the ads you see on regular television.
Hulu seems to have a wider selection of more recent cartoons (Steven Universe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Adventure Time) anime, and regular shows. It’s nice to have it all available.
So is anyone still subscribed to Hulu, and at what tier? We have the basic $8 service, but the amount and frequency of commercials is just on the absurdly stupid level, to the point that there is no difference between Hulu and regular tv. I was complaining to the wife that a 40m show seems to run longer than an hour now.
I see their ad-free service applies to most everything save a few select shows now. Have most users jumped to the $12 tier, or just ditched the service altogether? To be fair, the main users are the kids, what with the Wiggles and all the other shows, which are commercial free.
I was happy with the $12 service; unsubscribed for the summer but will probably start it back up when some of the fall shows that hit Hulu first start up again. Assuming that hasn’t changed for the new season, and I can remember what it was I watched…
I am on the $12 tier as well. Once I went ad-free, it was impossible to go back. What I do is I watch Hulu for a month, and then I suspend my account for the maximum time allowed, 3 months. And then I watch for a month, catch up on all the shows and episodes I missed in that 3 month period, so all the episodes of Brooklyn Nine Nine and Last Man on Earth, for instance. During that month I suspend any other memberships I have going, like Netflix, so that I’m only watching Hulu shows and Hulu movies. And then during the 3 month suspension of Hulu, I get Netflix going again, etc.
That sounds like a fair amount of work, but if it works for you, bravo! I do like how you can binge shows again that way though, or with the ad-free tier. I’m basically paying for regular tv. :(
I haven’t touched Hulu in years. Netflix and HBO Go are already more than I can really keep up with, but if I were contemplating switching around, the idea that even their “ad-free” tier has ads in some cases offends me on a deep and fundamental level that would lead me to definitely not choose Hulu.
I’m on the ad-free tier and am pretty happy with it at least in terms of content. There was something about some shows still including ads as part of their contracts, but I haven’t run into any yet.
They did redo their iOS/AppleTV interface recently though and I hate the new interface. It’s currently got a 1.5 rating on the App Store, so I’m clearly not the only one who hates it. They took an information rich, easy to browse interface and made it colorful and low-information. For example, instead of seeing a summary of all the available shows or a list of all the episodes available in a show, they now show a big screenshot of a single show or single episode, and you have to dig down to get the information you really want. It’s really horrible.
I’m on the $12 tier, where most shows have no ads. Yes, some shows have an ad at the beginning and the end (and I only see the beginning ad, because when the credits roll I stop and move on to something different, so I haven’t seen an end-ad), but that is literally just 7 shows from their whole catalog.
During the traditional TV season, Hulu is my preferred way to watch shows on regular broadcast channels (ABC, NBC and Fox), as they’re available ad-free the following day. They also get the occasional FX show, so I was able to watch Legion without ads.
My problem with Hulu ads is the lack of variety. There’s a lot of people from India living in my zipcode, so every damn commercial break it’s the same series of ads trying to convince Indians that video poker is really fun and cool for young people to play. It’s 10 times more annoying than if they had a normal amount of ads to cycle through.
