A couple years ago I was watching Hulu and noticed the ads always felt like they took much longer to play than they should.<p>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.<p>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.
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?<p>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 <i>never</i> a time where I think "Oh, let's watch episode 9 from season 3 from this show I've never watched before".<p>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 <i>suck</i>. I'd really like it if there were a good movie service, like Netflix once was. Hulu obviously isn't that, of course.
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?<p>Think this a smart move on Hulu's part. And depending on the economics, potentially smart for Yahoo+Verizon too.
I remember when Hulu first launched. Hulu was the future.<p>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.<p>I was forced to take the node down, because my brother wanted Hulu, and we live together.<p>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.<p>Way to make yourself less relevant.
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.<p>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.
> main product appeal: choose what to watch.<p>> free, ad-supported version: you can't choose what to watch.<p>I may be wrong here, but why even call them by the same name?