Hulu’s Live TV service to cost $39.99/month with ads, sources say | Hacker News Reader

Hulu’s Live TV service to cost $39.99/month with ads, sources say

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17 pointsartsandsci64 comments

I love that these companies want to take advantage of cord cutters yet come in with cable prices and bundles - exactly why people cut cable to begin with. Even sling tv moved deep into bundle territory. Just let me pick the exact channels I want.

Well, their motives are not necessarily aligned with cord cutters as they are owned by cable companies[1].

[1] Hulu LLC, a joint venture with The Walt Disney Company (through Disney–ABC Television Group) (30%),[8] 21st Century Fox (through Fox Entertainment Group) (30%), Comcast (through NBCUniversal) (30%), and as of August 10, 2016, Time Warner (through Turner Broadcasting System) (10%, minority stake)

Most of us don't even want "channels": we want specific shows. If you still want to call a bundle of shows a "channel", that's fine, but you should curate it a lot differently than the cable model of "channel", but the natural term in cord-cutting world for a bundle of shows seems to be more "app" or "site".

As a long time cord cutter, I can't tell you how many conversations the answer from me to "What channel is it on?" was legitimately Hulu or Netflix or Amazon.

> Most of us don't even want "channels": we want specific shows.

That, and have different viewing habits.

I am watching a very small number of shows (usually somewhere between 1 and 3) at any given time, and watch the entire season (or sometimes multiple seasons) before moving onto something else. For shows where I'm caught up with the most recent season but are released as one episode a week, I wait until they're done the season before starting the first episode.

Also, when I want to watch a show, I want to watch a show. I do not schedule my life around TV. I do not care that it's 12 minutes past the hour, or that new episodes come out on Wednesdays, or that I missed watch last week's episode.

Old cable TV considers DVR the solution here, and this service looks to have "cloud DVR" but that misses the point. Netflix has no "DVR" because you can just press play and watch any show they have. I assume you have to press "record" in advance in order for it to be in your DVR -- maybe it's really advanced and it'll "record" the show from the start even if it's already started.

Realistically, a "Cloud DVR" is basically just a whole bunch of files storing each show, and a database entry that says user x has access to file y. Pressing "record" is what makes that database entry, with arbitrary rules that say you can't do it if the "air date" is in the past, and you can only have just so many database entries that total up to 200 hours of content.

It's not much different than Netflix, except that Netflix doesn't have the access control database or arbitrary rules.

I feel like the "Cloud DVR" is kind of a legal workaround, probably because of the contracts they have with media providers. PlayStation Vue has one and it sometimes offers you "recorded" content and sometimes "on-demand", which is subtly different and mostly doesn't matter. Creators and providers are dragged into the future kicking and screaming, while Netflix and the like are eating their lunch.

I feel like "Cloud DVR" is as much of an intentional missing-the-point on the part of traditional players in the market. It still feels a lot like "based on how popular the Tivo originally was, people really want a DVR" and missing the point that regardless of the technology actually used: people just wanted to watch shows on their schedule, not some overpaid executive's schedule based on astrology readings and Nielsen surveys (which may as well be astrology readings themselves).

Beyond maybe being a legal workaround and maybe being a way to not confuse old people used to decades of cable subscription: Continuing to apply "Cloud DVR" as a terminology for and its "modern VCR" skeumorphism to services like PlayStation Vue continues the tradition of treating "live TV" as "the real thing" and on-demand/Cloud DVR as the exception and the lesser experience. It's hard not to see that as a willful ignorance from the existing players that they might still have hope to put the genie back into the bottle and return to the halcyon days where people lived to TV schedules and captive eyeballs were guaranteed delivered to very happy advertisers.

We're going on a half century of still-good television and films that have already been made! That's probably more TV than someone could watch in a whole lifetime! Even if all you do is borrow DVDs from the library (usually for free), you can still get an hour or two of quality video entertainment every night for a few decades (if not the rest of your life!) without ever seeing any new television/film content made after today. So the TV/film industry's "need" to produce (all too often low-quality) content 24/7 is no longer something anyone has to put up with!

Except for consistent audience draws like sports, and (to a lesser extent) news coverage. Those are the lifelines of the cable TV industry, and no-one has solved that problem yet.

Not completely solved but getting there.

https://www.sling.com/programming/sports

It's only consistent because they've lowered people's standards over time, like boiling a frog. The sooner people realize there's better ways to spend their time, and that they can get better and more relevant news and sports coverage much quicker than traditional TV by using the internet properly (on their phones presumably), they'll be that much quicker to jump ship and move to things like Netflix or library DVDs.

Couldn't the same thing be said about books, apps, tech... or opinions? The critical difference is relevance to the present age.

And technological improvements making some TV even possible.

Game of Thrones being a perfect example, you could have made it in the 1990s, but what is possible today is completely different from what has been possible previously.

Yep. We really enjoy watching the new Marvel movies when they come out, and watching older superhero movies from anything before the 2000s is painful at this point. But things like Star Trek TNG or Stargate SG-1 really hold up to the test of time.

Yes, but this does not include things happening right now: Sports (yes, I love watching great games from the past, but for many people it's important to see it as it happens), and News (also yes, I prefer text-based news, but talking heads are the preferred method for many people). Streaming doesn't have a good answer for these services.

Live soaps and reality TV shows, though, I agree are kind of pointless.

Inching closer and closer to Big Cable prices. Considering most streamers have both Netflix and Hulu, the cost of "cutting the cable" is slowly becoming noncompetitive.

Not when a HD DVR is ~20$/month on it's own. However, stopped using Hulu a long time ago. If you look at their paid customer numbers is relativity tiny @12 million for $7.99 per month. By comparison 25% of households in the US have 'cut cable' and many people have cable because it's cheaper as a bundled service.

Tivo is $15/month or less. And remote boxes are free.

http://www.defefx.com/fios-tv-equipment/

Cable Card is 4$ / month, and there is an extra fee for HD TV but does not provide access to Video on Demand. The downside is that you’ll also need a TiVO subscription which is $12.95 per month 13 + 4 = 17$/month.

On top of this there is a fee for HD TV.

DVR service (in any room) from Comcast costs me $10/month.

http://cordcuttersnews.com/starting-2017-comcast-will-charge...

Now that fee is jumping from just $3.49 to $5.49 a month, which means that if you have three TVs in your house you will pay an extra $16.47 a month just for this fee. http://cordcuttersnews.com/starting-2017-comcast-will-charge...

So adding a new TV costs ~10$ + $5.49 a month. That sounds like it's costing 16$/month per HD DVR.

Here are some other 'fees' https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161213/09004336262/happy...

Until I see it on my bill, it's pure speculation.

This pricing seems to include live TV + traditional hulu which is not a nominal differentiation

> most streamers have both Netflix and Hulu

That's not a true statement. Netflix has almost an order of magnitude more subscribers.

Correct, I should have stated "most people with Hulu probably also have a Netflix subscription"

It was cheaper for me to uncut cable. 90 a month for internet. 75 for internet and basic cable with a free Roku 3 with no contract. I don't use cable or the Roku.

You didn't shop around enough then. If you can get internet+cable+taxes for less than the cost of internet only there is a better deal out there

nope. $5/mo cheaper for double the internet speed and "free" cable TV. Comcast is desperate to get their subscriber numbers up.

But with Comcast, I would also pay each month.

$50 - 5 extra set top boxes $10 - "HD Technology Fee" $5 - "Broadcast Access Fee" $5 - "Regional Sports Fee"

That's $70/month in fees.

I pay:

$10 - Netflix - I would have this anyway.

$19 - Sling ($30 normally. I get a $5 discount through TMobile and a $5 discount for being on the Orange Beta)

$11.99 - Netflix no commercials

$6 - CBS all access

I also have Amazon Prime. I probably would have that anyway but I do have Amazon Prime Video. Let's say it's worth $5.00 a month.

I pay less for all of the subscriptions services than I would just in fees for Comcast. On top of that, they are a lot less of a hassle to cancel.

Nope. Like most of the US, I have access to only one provider here in NYC (Unless you include slow, unreliable DSL or... shudder... dialup). And a friendly employee I know was kind enough to look through all possible deals

It's been cheaper for a long time. In fact, I "pay" for cable TV service because it doubles my internet speed and drops my price $5/mo, even though the cable box is sitting in my attic and I use my antenna for TV programming.

I bought a cablecard-based TV tuner ($100) and "rent" a card from Comcast -- no box sitting in my attic, and I actually get a $2.50/mo bill rebate from Comcast for using my own equipment.

This is generally true if you buy internet from a cable provider. They'd rather sell you both services.

It wasn't true the previous 13 years in the same location.

It's just Hulu that is becoming noncompetitive.

Agreed. Netflix will catch up - they can't (or won't want to) continue to pay top dollar for talent & content and be a low cost provider.

I recommend buying individual shows, via iTunes/Google/etc. These are typically ~25/season, and don't include any commercials. No need to deal with DVR restrictions, fastfowarding issues/etc.

As I get older I'm starting to consider other types of costs as well. My time and "brain space" are more valuable to me now, so if I'm going to spend an hour watching something with my wife, I don't want 15-20 minutes of that to be ads. I want to find something interesting quickly. This is also why I'm unhappy with the new Netflix rating system, since I feel it's going to lead to worse recommendations for me.

As always when these topics come up, I think video content licensing needs to be revamped, so that anyone can create a streaming service as long as they pay a fixed rate to the license owner. It would spur so much innovation!

I really wish that the content library subscription business model wasn't inextricably linked to a given provider's user interface. Our software could be so much better if the APIs for accessing content were open, especially for music. I really don't like using cloud software with shifting feature sets beyond my control.

"Cloud DVR Bundle - The live TV service will allow for a certain amount of recording...But this recording space will not be a fully functional DVR, as it will not support fast-forwarding"

No thanks. Is there a competitor (PS Vue, Sling, others?) that lets you fast forward past commercials?

Edit: Apparently the ability to FF is spotty, no matter who the "cloud TV service" is. If they offer it at all, it works on some shows and not others, and is also spotty for "on demand" content vs dvr content.

Honest answer: piracy. If companies won't let you pay to avoid advertising, let them know it's a problem by not paying at all.

"If I can't have it exactly the way that I want it, I'm going to acquire it illegally."

An interesting and recurring theme in piracy, to be sure.

Calling something a DVR when it doesn't have FF is also interesting. If it's "ON DEMAND" with easy bookmarking, that's fine, but it's not a DVR.

Well it seems to be the only thing that drives improvement in media licensing. Without piracy I suspect iTunes and Spotify would have come decades later, if at all. I suspect the same can be said for Steam. Piracy really is an availability problem.

That's not what I said. I'm not very picky at all, I have two requirements for streaming services: have the content I want and do not advertise to me. There are several services that satisfy this requirement: Netflix, HBO Go, Google Play Music. I subscribe to all three.

On PS Vue it depends on the method to watch the show. If it's a "favorited show" in the 28(I think) day DVR, you can fast forward at any point. If you watch "catch up"(shows that PS Vue has decided to store in the cloud but not one of your 'favorites) or "on demand" shows, most time FF will be turned off or limited.

I think it's a mistake for PS Vue to combine the two like this - it makes "on demand" look exactly the same as DVRing (begging the question of why you'd DVR anything) but in reality, as you say, it's terrible. Once I worked that out (and learned to just DVR anything of passing interest) I was fine.

Ahh. So you've been able to FF in anything you've specifically set to record?

maybe the article has beene dited since :

>Thankfully, Hulu’s cloud DVR will give users the ability to fast-forward through the commercials in their recorded content – just like a cable TV DVR would.

>However, though both Vue and Sling’s DVR technically support fast-forwarding, the option is not always available due to rights deals. It will be interesting to see if Hulu’s live TV service faces those same issues when it arrives.

Good catch, looks like it was edited some time after I quoted that earlier text.

Ads you say? No thanks.

I agree...either charge me money or show me ads.

Something surprising I learned a while ago is that one of cable tv's selling points used to be no ads.

This is one of those urban myths that refuses to die. I've looked for the supporting evidence and can find none. When we got cable as a kid in the 70s, that was certainly not the selling point. Cable was used by remote communities that were out of range of the broadcast signal. The only channels that existed at the time (i.e. ABC, NBC, CBS) all had adverts.

And they block your ability to fast-forward.

Dumb. I know why they do it, but my life is too short to fastforward.

Want me as a customer? Then you need:

1) No ads. I will not tolerate ads in my house. I do not want your clown burgers or your overpriced car. if that means I need to pay 10% more, then charge me the 10% more.

2) Ala-Carte pricing. I do not watch sports. I am not going to pay $20 a month for ESPN and a bunch of sports programs. I will totally pay a few bucks for the history channel, or something that has value.

3) Needs to be fully streaming or TIVOed. i.e. let me watch at 6:23 pm or 7:19 pm. No sitting around until 8:00pm so I can watch a show.

Currently do Netflix + HBO and have more TV shows than I can watch. Totally willing to throw in a few more bucks for something of value, but no $200 cable package is going to happen here.

If you're willing to pay 50% more for no ads, they wouldn't let you. Since you're the target.

But they do...with Hulu Plus already. ($8 vs $12)

Much like youtube live, there is no way it's worth the price.

> unlimited DVR with up to 200 hours of programming.

Is this not a contradiction? Sounds limited to me (not that I'd likely record 200+ hrs of TV).

I think it means there's no limit to which programs you can record.

Hulu: "We've seen what the cable companies are doing and it seems to be going poorly for them. So we're going to go ahead and give that a shot"

"Don't you see? The only way to decrease piracy is to provide more ad-supported services that cost a premium...otherwise how do we pay the lawyers?"

"We've seen what we are doing so we are just going to continue doing what we are doing".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulu

(Hulu is owned by cable providers)

Exactly. We canceled Hulu ages ago. Look! I can pay for Hulu, and get the exact same service as people that get it for free---but on something other than a browser!

Canceling "cable" was a bit jarring at first, but I don't miss it anymore. It was kind of like trying to stop watching the show "24". The show had its hold until I missed the subsequent episode, then it was gone; I didn't care anymore.

Hulu silently removed free streaming and replaced it with Yahoo TV, I guess.

https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/08/hulu-ending-free-streami...

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