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Hulu Plus Now Available To All — But Be Warned
itwbennett writes "Peter Smith outlines some of the things you need to know before plunking down your $10 subscription fee for Hulu Plus, which yesterday came out of its invitation-only phase and is now open to everyone. First off, don't assume that paying $10 gets you out of viewing ads like it does on Netflix — and there's no way to skip them. Second, yes, there's tons of content available on Hulu Plus, but it's not necessarily the same content as hulu.com. 'So if you've been watching a show on hulu.com and can't wait to watch it on the big screen via your PS3, stop a moment and check the Hulu Plus listings,' advises Smith. And then there's the issue of performance, which at least in the preview version has been less than perfect."
What is the definition of all here? Does it for instance include Europe or anything outside of the US? Before we haven't been able to watch anything on Hulu.
Since I am from Europe that whole netflix and hulu-thing is beyond me. Why do you guys want to pay for this? You have torrents, youtube etc. What's on netflix or hulu that you just have to see? This is just a question from someone not familiar with these products and not intended as a troll or whatever. Just want to make that clear ;)
skimming over the hulu vs hulu plus, it's a toss up of whether to pay: hulu vs hulu plus: last 5 episodes of current popular shows, whereas plus gives you all current season of 45 popular shows. 800 full seasons from hundreds of shows vs full series runs for over 90 shows Kinda seems like they should rename from huluPLUS(misnomer assumes you get hulu PLUS extras) to huluDIFFERENT
What is the definition of all here?
It's the US definition, similar in meaning to their definition of 'world' in 'world series baseball'.
The term "available to all" is talking about it being available to all people that regular Hulu is already available to. Yes, yes, we know for the 5 millionth time that it's not available to Europe, etc etc. Do we really need to beat this dead horse in every Hulu story?
So if it adds some content to Just Plain Hulu, but meanwhile doesn't include all of the content from Just Plain Hulu, wouldn't that it make it "Hulu Plus Or Minus"?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Except that they still pay for cable TV and they still watch commercials on it. If anyone's learned a lesson from the move to cable TV it's the networks learning that people will do both.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
After having been a part of the beta "testing" of Hulu Plus, I feel that the limited benefits they provide don't outweigh the costs just yet. For one thing, you still are having to sit through commercials (which have increased to 2x 60-second commercials at times); combine that with the fact that a good chunk of the shows I'd want to watch from Hulu.com aren't even available through the PS3 app nor on my iPhone, and I felt I wasted the two months I spent on the service. Sure, the fact you're not limited to 5 episodes back is a good feature, but it definitely isn't worth the $15 they're asking for. I know I could pick up PlayOn for a similar experience, but it really irks me that they can't provide several of these shows through their Hulu Plus apps but are perfectly capable of having them on Hulu Desktop.
It seems it still applies to the USA only. You can probably blame region-based content licensing for all these artificial limitations.
Just like how we can't pay a British TV license fee and watch iPlayer content in the USA.
This is a US-based website. A few people need to realize that and get over it.
The tagline wording could have been better - ie. "Hulu Plus no longer invitation-only", but this is Slashdot - it's not like people expect (or ever see) high journalistic standards applied here.
Putting moderation advice in your
Hulu has a number of problems right now which, I imagine, probably translate over to their paid subscriptions:
* Poor performance due to Flash. The latest versions of Flash have caused nothing but problems for us at home - surprisingly, worse on Windows than on Linux. We'll occasionally have to restart the browser 1-3 times throughout a show due to dropped frames and choppiness resulting from Flash leakages and the like.
* Ads. They're not only getting more obnoxious but they're getting longer and more frequent. (That one about the 'skittles tree-boy' has to be the most offensive, disturbing ad I've ever seen.)
* Decreasing content. A lot of what used to be there, is no longer (BSG). No, I don't care if I can watch a show's latest 5 episodes: character development is important to me. If I can't watch the beginning of a season (particularly if it's a drama), I'm going to skip the show.
Add in the lack of the downsides, and I don't see the benefit. Maybe for $1-5, but certainly not for $10/mo.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Or it's that the target audience of the story is American users of Hulu
If the story was posted on a Hulu user site that might be excusable. Using 'us', if the writer was from the US, would be imprecise but not wrong. Were I posting on a site specifically linked to one country then yes, use of 'all' to mean 'all in that country' would be fine too. However using 'all' on an internationally read site to mean "only US" is just wrong. This site is supposed to be "News for nerds. Stuff that matters" not "News for US nerds. Stuff that matters to americans." If it were I would not be reading it.
"...have been happily using netflix and hulu plus for 2 months now..." - and - "...I am so happy i am not supporting FOX and..." Who do you think partially owns Hulu?
Because we live in Amerika, where politicians are bought and paid for by the big media companies. Unlike European countries (yeah, I am making a gross generalization here) where your politicians at least make an half-hearted attempt to protect your rights. Ours sold them at firesale prices to the content companies. So we're to either pay up or face insane fines and/or jail terms.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Except that they still pay for cable TV and they still watch commercials on it. If anyone's learned a lesson from the move to cable TV it's the networks learning that people will do both.
My DVR says hi.
Netflix has the DVDs. For $9 a month they will deliver them to your door, and let you use their streaming service.
Always easy to spot the alcoholics on the internet.
You're paying the ISP to transfer the data, Hulu is providing the content which is supported by the ads. If you're paying the ISP for data, and paying Hulu for the content, then having to watch the ads seem to be a pretty poor deal.
I (naively) though Hulu plus was going to be ad-free. Since it's still got ads, what is the point? What are you paying for? The ability to watch TV on your playstation? Even though you can already watch Hulu for free on your PC? That makes no sense - if they want ad revenue they should be pushing it out to every device imaginable.
When I heard about the upcoming Hulu Plus release I decided to give the regular Hulu a try for the first time. What a disappointment, I tried to watch the first episode of Hawaii-Five-Oh to see what it was like, but I guess it was too late to still see the series premier, as they only went back as far as episode 3. (don't ask me why they wouldn't have all episodes of a brand new show)
So I started watching episode 3 and it hung my browser. I restarted my browser and was able to watch to the second commercial, then the screen dimmed and a message appeared on the top of the playback window saying something like "your browser must allow ads to view this content", though the show continued playing, just dimmer. Conveniently, ads continued to play at full brightness and played just fine, but the show itself was dimmed out, so I continued to watch.
Then I paused it for 30 minutes to take a phone call and when I came back, it seemed to have timed out and I had to start over. Trying to skip back to where I left off made me sit through more ads - the same ones I had already seen.
So I gave up - I'll wait 'till it's available on Netflix. Or not. But I'm definitely not going to pay money for Hulu Plus after that experience.
People understand the idea of paying to get a service. You pay the cable company to get cable TV. For that you are a stupendous amount of channels that they deliver. However the programs themselves are separate, those require ads. Fine. When you buy an addon though, that is no ads. So you buy HBO. Those channels cost extra. Fine, you are paying to have no ads. It is a cost separate from the service.
Well now things are on the Internet. Again, people are ok with paying for the Internet. You pay the cable company, they give you Internet. Wonderful. However the content on the Internet is different, some of it has ads. Also fine. Then you have some pay for services on the Internet, like Netflix. Costs money, instead of ads. Also good.
This falls in the new category of "You have to pay for it on top of your service AND get ads." I don't think it is going to fly, particularly not given that there are alternatives. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so.
I do not have dish, cable or over the air TV, my living room LCD is connected to a computer, which plays DVDs, blew-Ray disks, ripped movies, old Tivo recordings from when I had cable, netflix, hulu, and occasionally CBS.com's craptacular website.
Apparently Hulu plus is not made for me at all.
Logging in and out of the plus account to watch different shows, seeing that there was NOT ONE SINGLE THING that was on hulu plus that I wanted but could not get from Hulu or Netflix was really annoying.
I had signed up for support for other devices, but since it really didn't add anything, I dropped it after one annoying month.
I guess it is just a geek thing, but imo if you want your TV to do something that your computer can do, just connect your computer to your TV, it isn't that hard, you don't even really need a special cable nowadays as many comps come with hdmi ports. (My "TV" computer us a $150 cheapo machine that does the job just fine.)