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Comment by ARussell | Hacker News Reader

I refused to ever subscribe to cable television because of commercials, and I suspect I am not the only one. I never subscribed to Hulu, either, for the same reason (if they have an ad-free offering now, I've missed it because I stopped paying attention to them). I also will not use Netflix's ad-driven tier when it comes out.

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I never paid for Hulu+ because the content I wanted had ads and the ads on Hulu are horrible. At least on broadcast and cable TV there's a mechanism to prevent the ads from getting stuck playing in a loop.

Hulu has had an ad-free option for most of it's life, although I think for a handful of videos the rights situation still required them to still show at least one ad for a movie or episode of a show

Hulu has an ad-free tier.

We had to move to it because our kids have not experienced commercials and would get upset every time some came on. They just didn’t understand interruptions to what they were watching.

I should clarify that Hulu's "ad-free" tier isn't entirely ad-free. Certain programs may actually have an ad play before them, though usually I've only noticed this when, for example, Hulu has a deal with an existing channel to stream a show as soon as it airs on cable TV.

Annoys the hell out of me that they continue to call it "Hulu (No Ads)". It really shows the level of respect they have for their customers.

https://help.hulu.com/s/article/ads-no-commercials

They've been trying to pare down that list ever since that tier was introduced. At this point, the only show on it is Grey's Anatomy.

Huh, TIL. There are two or three shows that I just stopped bothering with altogether on Hulu and have been torrenting for years because of those ads, while we used Hulu for shows that didn't have any ads at all. I wish their communication around this had been stronger, I wonder how long ago I would've stopped pirating them.

Thanks for pointing that out! (And I should dig into those details the next time I share links like that)

At my mom's house I had fun trying to explain to my 4 year old that we couldn't pause the TV, and that even if we turned it off the show would keep going.

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