What are Hulu's owners really selling? | Hacker News Reader

What are Hulu's owners really selling?

allthingsd.com

8 pointsbproper7 comments

What is their advertising revenue versus subscription revenue?

I have Hulu plus and I really don't care for it. I don't like the commercials forced upon me. Originally, Hulu would display the length of the commercial and keep it under 30 seconds. Hulu has been increasing commercial lengths and frequency and sometimes removes the time display for commercials, particularly the longer commercials.

I would like if Hulu had a 'channel' where I could watch a continuous stream of all the ads Hulu served. I do like commercials, but not the way the commercials interrupt the viewing experience, unlike Netflix.

Also, rewind and fast-forward is severely delayed. If you watch a TV show, and you missed something right before it went to commercial, you cannot rewind and watch the portion again and then the commercial. You must wait through the 2 one minute commercials to be able to rewind 15 seconds backward, but it takes another 10 seconds for the streaming server to respond to the request to rewind backwards for 15 seconds.

Compared to Netflix streaming, it is an inferior product technically. Netflix seems to have every movie Hulu Plus has, but charges less. Rewind and Fast-forward are near instant.

Netflix could kill Hulu by offering an enhanced TV streaming tier of service. I would rather give my money to Netflix. I would probably pay up to $30/month, maybe $35 if Netflix offered current season Comedy Central shows and Modern Family.

Why is Workaholics delayed by 3 episodes on Hulu?

Is that really the case with commercials and rewinding? I don't use Hulu frequently (I either buy the DVDs or torrent), but I thought that once you watched a commercial you could skip back and forth over it without having to watch it again.

On the iPad version, at least, you often have to re-watch commercials because you rewind, or because the player bugged out and you had to close it and re-open it.

It really is an inferior experience compared to Netflix.

Torrents cannot compete with Hulu (from what I have heard).

Yeah, I had Hulu Plus for a bit, and the thing about the commercials that got me was the bait and switch time indication. They'd have a countdown saying "Your video will resume in 30 seconds", then another commercial would start and the countdown would reset! Not impressed.

Even worse, the commercial time seemed to pick up the same time they started betaing Hulu Plus. That's why I dropped it after two months.

"because the company couldn’t secure long-term exclusive content licenses from its owners."

Why is it that everyone thinks they need exclusivity? Hulu doesn't have enough infrastructure already to maintain their customer base? Seems to me they've got more than enough... PCs, Game Consoles, even some TVs have built-in support for it... And few others have any support at all.

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