I woke up this morning to an email in my inbox from Hulu saying that my account had been updated to include LiveTV, which pushed my subscription cost from $12/month to $40/month. I did not initiate this update so I logged into my account to see what’s going on. From within the Hulu My Account page, unlike Netflix or any other streaming service, there’s no way to:
change your basic subscription
see who/where has been accessing your account
So I contacted customer support via text chat: “Can I remove this LiveTV option that was added while I was sleeping 7 hours ago?”
Answer: “Sure, you just need to respond yes or no to the following paragraph.” The paragraph included a prorated charge for LiveTV from now until the end of my billing cycle, which was for $26. I called bullshit. They held firm. Suffice to say, I’m no longer a Hulu subscriber.
What a weird thing. This should have been handlable by me from my account page, without friction, without having to take up customer service’s time, lose them a customer and me a streaming service. On Netflix it wouldn’t have been a problem. I could re-signup for Hulu, but I’m reluctant to because:
no tracking of account logins
no way to change base subscription from my account
no detailed invoice for upcoming or past bills
no 2-factor login
inflexible billing and unresponsive customer service
I liked Hulu, so kind of to lose it. (My girlfriend will be even sadder.) But c’est l’vie.
All dealbreakers for me. I got Hulu once a billion years ago because it had a good Criterion selection (and was the only place you could see Rossellini’s Socrates. in some weird exclusive deal they had) Now all that goodness is on Filmstruck (which doesn’t have-the dealbreakers above).
A year ago I had someone make a bunch of purchases of Hulu gift subs from my account. I called and initially got a run-around until I threatened to simply file a fraud complaint with my credit card holder. That got me escalated to a manager-type, who was more than happy to nuke those fraudulent charges – and give me a 30 day credit – for my trouble.
One thing that streaming services with “loose” login protection – Netflix is the other – are going to have to make a reconciliation on is the number of logins allowed from separate IP addresses. Right now, that lack of login diligence is a “feature”: in their calculation, they’d rather not bother with it, because it allows a younger demographic to buy a single account and share their passwords/logins. They know very much that this happens, and that eventually they’re going to have to crack down. But until then…it’s still kind of the wild west mentality.
One other thing that may have happened: you or someone with access may have inadvertently opted in for a free trial (7 days is Hulu’s standard) of their live TV service, and that 7 days expired and you got charged after the fact–even if you didn’t realize you’d opted in for it. They’ve been offering various free trials for a while now, here and there.
Weird. Almost this same thing happened to me. I’d left one of my weak passwords on Hulu for years since I didn’t really use it. About a year ago I subbed to the premium plan, and never thought to secure it more. Someone started watching stuff on there based on some weird recommendations that started showing up that I didn’t understand at the time. Honestly if they’d just stuck to watching bad action movies we’d have been fine. But then they added live TV with all the movie and sports packages and I got that same email…
…at which point I was easily able to unsubscribe from my browser, which is why I’m sharing. Didn’t end up am issue at all.
Not with Hulu, but with Sling. Similar story; received an email that my account had been reactivated in the middle of the night. Of course, these subscription services will happily let you upgrade and give them more money online, but GFL getting them to cancel - I’ve run into this with Sling, SiriusXM, and Time Warner/Spectrum to name a few. I ended up calling in and the rep cancelled my account and removed my credit card info (another thing you’re not able to do online) with no issue. The complete lack of push back made it feel like this was something they dealt with all the time.
One good takeaway from these shared experiences: use a credit card with fraud protection, if you can, for these kinds of subscriptions. Or even a regular credit card/debit card, where you can threaten to do a chargeback (that’s the term --along with “fraud” – that will perk up ears with a customer service rep, fwiw.) Even though Paypal promises fraud protection, it tends to be a drawn out process that is far less likely to end happily for the individual consumer, so steer clear of that option if it’s offered if you can.
Maybe I’m confused by what you mean. I’m not going to say thier UI is good but I just logged into Hulu -> Account, clicked the “Manage add-ons” button and that lets me downgrade from my no commercial plan or upgrade to live tv. Do you not have that?
Yeah, I didn’t see that. I assumed that the Manage Add-On button was for managing add-ons. It was shown in the same box that my HBO add-on was, not the box that detailed my (newly updated) subscription plan, nor the box for billing. I did ask the CS rep I was chatting with if it was possible to change it on my own, and she did not point out how to do this. I asked if she could provide an invoice that detailed the charges she was asking for, and she did not respond. I asked her to explain the prorated charge (which didn’t even really make sense as a prorated charge–it was more than half of the monthly rate, with only 1 week left in my billing cycle) and she just repeated that they couldn’t “roll back the charge.” I also asked for and was promised an email transcript of our chat, which I have not received. This wasn’t a headache I needed on Sunday morning. She did mention that I could avoid the pro-rated charge by unsubscribing and then resubscribing. That is dumb. But if I really want to watch their shows, maybe I can convince my gf to sign up for it and get the sign-on bonuses again.
On Netflix, my boyfriend and I started running into the “too many devices are using this subscription” issue. I think the basic threshold is 2 devices, but you can increase that. Then, several Spanish language tv shows started popping up in our recently watched.
It took us a bit of digging through the UI, but there is a way to see where in the country your devices are streaming Netflix from - and in this case we had someone from Georgia using our account.
The annoying part was that there were different UI options depending on what device we were using. (Phone vs PS4 vs Laptop). We changed all the login and credit care info, but they were still using the account, I imagine they were automatically logged in, but if I recall correctly there was a “kick everyone on this account offline” option that was only available on the PC UI that finally forced them out.
Yeah it’s definitely poorly organized and at first I was with you going “well that’s messed up”. I clicked on that manage button just because I couldn’t believe they didn’t have a way to cancel or change your subscription type (e.g. give them more money)
Media scuttlebutt more and more suggesting that HULU may drop their LiveTV service at some future point. Subscription numbers have been down, and the big competitors in the space (Sony/VUE, DirecTVNow, and SlingTV) are finding the same thing: under-35s prefer to not watch live, scripted TV at all, and don’t care for the option so much. On demand is where its at.
And frankly, HULU remains in complete limbo. Will Disney transform it into their coming Disney-Fox based streaming platform? Comcast seems to hope so, and hopes The Mouse will buy out Comcast’s 40% share in the service. But…Disney may want to build their streaming platform from the ground-up, and see Hulu as a saleable asset they can deal off. Would Comcast like to buy out their 60% stake? Would someone else?
I’m thinking that Sony could be interested in Disney’s stake, taking over and consolidating the Hulu LiveTV base into its own VUE subscription base and then getting rid of whatever the hell Crackle is now.
Logins to all of those services are bought and sold on the black market all the time. In many cases they’re worth more than credit card numbers, because they’re easier to monetize through resale and most people never notice someone extra is glomming off their account.
I don’t get the appeal of LiveTV either, except during breaking news. I’m glomming off a family YouTube TV account, which actually works really well these days.
Even sports, unless it’s specifically designed to be watchable by an american audience (American Football, for instance, which is shown on Sunday, or Monday or Thursday evening when we’re home from work), you really want it on demand on top of having it accessible live. If I’m watching Wimbledon, or the World Cup, it’s nice to have access to live sports, but most of the time that happens when most of us are at work. So you need access to on-demand as well.
HULU, btw, is now geolocating from your account address and the IP where you log in now. Not sure how they account for travel, VPNs, etc, but they’re obviously trying to track down on people using their parents/roommates/colleagues logins.
On-demand, when it comes to cable TV replacement services, is a bit deceptive. You’re probably thinking of Netflix or the original Hulu. But with a TV replacement service like PS Vue, Hulu Live TV, YouTube TV, etc, VOD is the same content that Comcast, Spectrum, etc, will send you. And in most cases, they force you to watch commercials on all VOD.
What you want when it comes to a cable TV replacement service is a DVR. That lets you fast-forward through commercials, except of course where it doesn’t, like on YouTube TV with CBS and CW programming.
It’s all a bit of a mess.
@triggercut: Not sure how Hulu does it, but with YouTube TV, they will let you freely travel as long as you geolocate in the original locale once every 90 days. It doesn’t have to be the same IP address, just the same zipcode. There are various ways around this of which of course a VPN is the easiest, but you can also hardcode your coordinates inside Google Chrome and do it that way.
