Hulu to Charge by 2010
newteevee.com
newteevee.com
My DirecTV was ~$75/month with taxes which cost me around $2/hour based on 1hr a day. I switched to Hulu because my costs went from $75 to $0. I'd probably be willing to pay up to $30/month commercial free or $15/month with commercials.
I do wonder if Hulu will seriously be able to compete with cable when Comcast is on the board.
i canceled my directv subscription a while back and just download the few shows i care about that come through torrent rss feeds. if i could watch them live via something like hulu, but then also access them whenever i wanted after that point, i'd be a customer.
Don't judge me.
The upside of this is that I watch far less TV because it has a real and immediate cost (especially if it's not on Hulu). The downside is that the endless buffering and stuttering I get on Hulu drives me crazy. I know that my ISP may be partly to blame, but that makes Hulu a lot less valuable to me than the downloadable iTunes option. There's been more than one evening were Hulu simply refused to work reliably and I ended up purchasing the commercial-free episodes on iTunes instead. Ironically, the iTunes downloads were so fast that I could watch the shows immediately as if they were streaming with the added bonus of actually owning the episode so I could watch it again later - perhaps long after Hulu removed it.
I've pretty much abandoned Hulu as Netflix's streaming library grows. $14/month or whatever is a tiny amount to pay for that amount and quality of on-demand commercial-free content.
In fact, I don't even go there for books. I know they don't have what I want, and Amazon does. I go there to work.