Hulu is eliminating its free, ad-supported streaming service | Hacker News Reader

Hulu is eliminating its free, ad-supported streaming service

theverge.com

30 pointskilink53 comments

A couple years ago I was watching Hulu and noticed the ads always felt like they took much longer to play than they should.

I got out my iPhone and timed the seconds as they counted down during ad time on Hulu. Each second of ad time on Hulu took 1.34 seconds of actual time to pass. They were telling you for example, that there were 2 minutes of ads about to play, but the 120 second countdown would actually take 160 seconds to pass.

I stopped watching Hulu altogether after that discovery. I think I checked back in more recently and they had stopped doing that, but it's still a little telling about where their head is at regarding ads and their customers.

I remember when Hulu first started, loved it, loved the idea.. at the time there was only one ad per adslot on shows, so the ratio of ads to content was much better. The down side was If you watched a few shows, you'd see the same ad about half the time, which got tiresome.

All around I'm disappointed to see content getting pushed farther down, to where several shows are now 41-42 minutes of content for an hour program, where it used to be closer to 48. I don't mind paying for content so much, but would rather not have to go to half a dozen places to get it... HBO, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon... what's next? I wouldn't mind paying the $50/month it costs combined if there was one place to watch everything ad-free.

I'm really surprised that Disney hadn't bought a stake in Netflix earlier on, as a lot of their family & children's content is very popular on the site.

Youtube uses some magical time calculation as well. When I watch on my roku it says "you can skip this ad in 5 sec", it usually takes ~7-10 for it to pop-up.

I just timed this, and yes, it took 10 seconds for the 5-second skip to pop-up

Hah! I always thought their second counter counted down kind of slow. Glad to have it confirmed. For several reasons I dislike Hulu and I haven't used their service for a few years now.

Hulu has always seemed like its primary goal is to serve the incumbent television providers, and not their viewers. I don't know if it's still this way, but when the paid version was first introduced, I tried it for a while, but they often only had the most recent season of a show. What am I supposed to do with that? Start watching a show at season 5?

Netflix gets it: I want to either watch the whole show from the beginning (not necessarily in a binge, but sometimes), or watch the first episode and stop. There is never a time where I think "Oh, let's watch episode 9 from season 3 from this show I've never watched before".

I have Netflix and Amazon Prime; is there a reason to add Hulu to the mix, at this point? Are there shows or movies on Hulu that I'm not getting from Netflix or Prime? I am becoming more and more disappointed in the selection at Netflix, even while their exclusive content has gotten better their movie selection has begun to suck. I'd really like it if there were a good movie service, like Netflix once was. Hulu obviously isn't that, of course.

> Hulu has always seemed like its primary goal is to serve the incumbent television providers, and not their viewers

Err, maybe because Hulu is literally owned by the incumbent television providers?

"... It is a subsidiary of Hulu, LLC, a joint venture of The Walt Disney Company,[8] 21st Century Fox, Comcast and as of 2016, Time Warner through their Disney-ABC Television Group, Fox Broadcasting Company, NBCUniversal Television Group and Turner divisions" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulu

> I have Netflix and Amazon Prime; is there a reason to add Hulu to the mix, at this point?

If you want to watch currently airing shows on your own schedule, instead of when they actually air. If you only like to watch back catalogs, maybe it isn't for you. But you can't watch the very latest episodes of in-season shows on Netflix or Prime (for the most part).

Hulu is mostly a replacement for DVR/cable On Demand, not DVD box sets (although they do have a decent number of full runs these days).

I don't own a TV and have never had cable. I have no idea what's currently on television. I don't really care to watch shows as they happen, in the general case; I'm fine watching them at the end of the season (or all at once from the beginning, the way Netflix does their shows). There are very few shows I'd be extra excited to get as they air (Game of Thrones is the only one that comes to mind, and I would pay to watch it in a reasonable way online, but HBO doesn't provide a reasonable way to do so).

Netflix has historically been my favorite of the available options; but their selection, particularly movies but also shows, has gotten pretty weak in recent years, so I always vaguely consider alternatives. But, mostly I just end up renting via Amazon Instant Video when it's something that Netflix and Prime don't have.

I always find Prime horrible for watching series, as they don't group the series together, at least not on the website. Agreed on Netflix's movie selection slipping. The problem is the battle between all the carriers. I'm not quite sure I get online rental pricing either... I mean, why can't they compete with Redbox here, where renting a movie for a 24hr viewing is $1? The streaming can't possibly cost more.

What's really needed is some consolidation. And I wouldn't mind seeing a service with a better ala cart model that's almost as much as buying DVD/BlueRay either.

> Are there shows or movies on Hulu that I'm not getting from Netflix or Prime?

Yes, each has a different set of back-catalog shows, Hulu has current-season shows from a number of networks, and all three outlets of exclusive, first-party content.

They also overlap significantly, so whether the marginal value of adding Hulu is justified is a question you'll have to answer yourself, but there is definitely stuff you won't have with the other two that you would by adding Hulu.

>I have Netflix and Amazon Prime; is there a reason to add Hulu to the mix, at this point?

The one thing Hulu does better than Netflix and Prime is Anime. But CrunchyRoll has them beat there.

Cool, now if they could not show ads for their paid service, that'd be great.

We pay $12/month so Hulu diesn't show us ads. Really worth the extra money.

There are still ads on some shows even if you pay $12.

In case anyone was wondering, from https://help.hulu.com/articles/52427902#list

"In response to feedback from our viewers, we started offering a commercial free experience on Hulu. For a small number of shows, however, we have not obtained the rights to stream commercial free and they are not included in our No Commercials plan. You can still easily access these shows with a short commercial before and after each episode with no interruptions during the episode. Specific shows that still have commercials accessible through the No Commercials plan will be noted throughout the signup, switching and playback experience. While the list of shows may change, they are currently: Grey’s Anatomy, Once Upon a Time, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Scandal, Grimm, New Girl, and How To Get Away With Murder."

It's seven shows, and even on those the ads are only at the beginning and end they don't interrupt the show. I say we cut them some slack.

cringes Well, I admit there are only a few things they don't have the full rights to, and they're shows I don't watch, but I still find this grating. They said "ad-free" and I pay for that. Not "almost ad-free".

So they pull the content that they'd have to show ads on, and now you're complaining that the paid tier has less content than the free tier does.

According to the news coverage I've read, those shows don't have "commercial breaks", they just have a single commercial at the beginning and end. Honestly, who cares? Just hit mute and sit quietly for 30 seconds.

I can't verify this for myself, because, although I'm a top-tier subscriber, I've never actually run across a Hulu commercial in the wild. Whichever shows those are, I guess I don't watch them.

You are correct, new, hot TV shows have ads, unless you wait a while. I have only watched series that already ran s I have not experienced any commercials.

They have an ad-free tier. Some people prefer to pay slightly less for the ad-full tier.

> Cool, now if they could not show ads for their paid service, that'd be great.

They offer it, but just like cable TV before it, the ad-free tier will go away as soon as somebody applies pressure on the bottom line.

If they do, they'll lose a ton of their customers.

They do and its exactly why i left them

Apparently, that exists. From the article:

> Hulu will still have advertising. The two current paid tiers — $7.99 a month with some ads and completely ad-free at $11.99 a month — are going to remain.

For 11.99 you get that for all but a handful of shows, and they tell you exactly which shows when you sign up.

Between Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBO Go, Showtime, etc on-demand services... what is left keeping people from cutting the cable TV cord? Just awareness and inertia? (Which are powerful, witness AOL dial-up ISP for a decade+.) Or are there other things keeping people tethered still? Sports? Reality TV series which don't all make it onto these on-demand services?

Think this a smart move on Hulu's part. And depending on the economics, potentially smart for Yahoo+Verizon too.

Sports and broadband speed. Many cable companies have pricing setups that make paying for just high-speed internet nearly as expensive as a slower package + TV (and the TV channels aren't impacted by broadband speed issues). Now, this is generally only true in the first year of a contract (and then you're bumped to truly insane rates for TV services), but if you're willing to shop around and have multiple people who might be streaming at once, it's a better deal that way.

I say all of this as a cord cutter myself. It took a while to figure out, but I was able to cobble together essentially every channel or show through legal means using Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Playstation Vue, HBONow and an OTA antennae. The costs savings only really worked out once my roommates and I all realized that each of us were paying for our own Netflix and HBONow subscription, but even without that, it's nearly the same price as our previous cable package (intro rate), plus has the luxury of being able to cancel each individual service should we decide to make any kind of change without having to go through the hell of Comcast customer service.

Sports is the big thing.

Also cutting cable cord doesn't really save you that much. In most cases you still need to buy internet access from your cable company which is hardly cheap.

If cable cutting becomes more widespread I expect cable companies to offer "discounted" cable channels with their Internet:

It's either $100/mo for 10mbps Internet + HBO or $99 for 10mbps Internet alone. HBO has been discounted to $1/month. What a great deal!

In the US, you cannot get Olympic coverage without a cable subscription. The streaming from NBC demands authentication with the credentials from your cable subscription. I don't have one. I can't even try to use my internet service credentials, because my current apartment includes 50/50 fiber for free (the most first world problem. Maybe even a .5 world problem).

I signed up for Sling[0] for a free trial to watch the games. The annoying part is that the event I truly care about (Judo) is minimally covered on network television and at awkward hours.

[0]http://www.sling.com

In the US, you cannot get Olympic coverage without a cable subscription.

Not entirely true if one doesn't mind a little grey area by SSH tunneling to your London, UK Linode and watching it on BBC. There was a good step-by-step post at http://bearsfightingbears.com/how-to-watch-the-olympics-live..., but it doesn't work for me anymore. It's what I did in 2012. Now I just don't care enough to bother. :-)

Yes, my "In the US" means for a network endpoint in the US. There are always ways to exert control over where the apparent endpoint of your connection is.

Sports and inertia are my guesses. Sports, because that's what I hear everyone say when asked why they still have cable. Inertia because paying the cable bill every month is easier than explaining to your spouse why he can't watch Real Housewives of Bumphuck, ID on a lark. That, and I don't think cord-cutting is for people that sit down in front of a TV to watch something. I've caught myself doing that: flip the remote until I find the least uninteresting thing that moves and makes noise.

My spouse, thankfully, is about as big a fan of commercial television as I am, so it was easy sell to unhook DirecTV seven or eight years ago. Between Netflix, iTunes, and HBO Now, we have more TV than we have time to watch (again, not big watchers to begin with). When we sit down, it's with a purpose, not channel-flipping. That's not to say we're more noble than others, as we'll bing-watch a series with the best of them. We just don't sit down to "watch TV", we sit down to "watch Stranger Things".

Hulu? That was part of our cord-cutting way back when. But the commercials got more frequent, and long before Hulu wised up and offered "ad-free" we just quit watching it. Sorry, Hulu, inertia works both ways and we got used to doing without you, never to return.

Cheaper to bundle your internet with cable than to just have internet.

In intro rates, yes. Outside of that, absolutely not. Yes, you can shop around annually. Or you can pay about the same and have the ability to cancel and turn back on subscriptions you stop using or want to start again.

You can get sports covered if you sign up for Playstation Vue. I have been off cable for several years, but had always missed ESPN/FS. Playstaiton Vue has fixed that for me.

Live events, for me. Primarily NFL/NBA/MLB games, but also things like live news coverage.

Most of the people I have asked who haven't cut the cord say they don't know how to set it all up or think it will be more complicated to use.

And/or they do not have internet at their house, only use the internet on their phone.

I think the *TV/Stick devices are pretty damned simple... I got my parent's a Roku a few years ago, and they still use it regularly (though they haven't cut the cord, mostly sports).

I think they're simple too, but then I remember working in tech support for DirecTv how many people just didn't plug the TV in.

I remember when Hulu first launched. Hulu was the future.

I than remember my IP being blocked by Hulu because I was running a Tor node. Before you say that sounds reasonable, it wasn't an exit node. And Tor provides methods to tell the diference.

I was forced to take the node down, because my brother wanted Hulu, and we live together.

Goodbye Hulu. Goodbye and good riddance. I know you think your customers will join your paid service. They won't. Most of your users are bound for either the richer streaming services, or PopcornTime and similar.

Way to make yourself less relevant.

Considering Hulu is owned by ABC, Fox, and Comcast, any optimism of a delighted customer would have been misplaced. They were basically competing against their own model and had every reason to make you miserable.

They refused to validate the netflix model.

Speaking as a member of an area Comcast serves, they are the devil. They're actually worse than other ISPs. Somehow.

Hulu was amazing when it launched, but it's gone downhill ever since. The last couple of times I've tried it, they show more commercials than I'd see just watching the show live or on-demand. Plus it was a 1:1 relationship so if a show had 10 commercials, it was the same one repeated 10 times.

Even if it was a free service, I can't justify using it over literally any other streaming option out there, including on-demand where you can't fast forward through commercials.

So you can PAY to see ads just like cable TV.

Or like most any magazine.

Unlike cable TV, you can pay more to not see ads.

Don't know why they still force you to watch commercials for anything that is on FOX even when you pay the upgrade.

I bet that the original licensing deals had terms based on "share of ad revenue". They had to renegotiate all their contracts to offer the ad-free tier, and not all the content providers played ball.

Only if you are on the $7.99 plan. To me, if you're willing to pay $7.99 for Hulu, why wouldn't you pay $4 more to avoid ads (unless you really like ads, I guess)?

> To me, if you're willing to pay $7.99 for Hulu, why wouldn't you pay $4 more to avoid ads (unless you really like ads, I guess)?

One can not like ads, but have the expected total disutility experienced in Hulu-based ads on the $7.99 plan that would be avoided on the $11.99 be worth less than $4/month, in which case the rational choice would be to not upgrade to the ad-free tier.

> main product appeal: choose what to watch.

> free, ad-supported version: you can't choose what to watch.

I may be wrong here, but why even call them by the same name?

Thats fine. The only option that makes sense to me is the highest plan. It's all or nothing

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