I could see this being good for someone who wants to watch a whole season or whole run of a show at a clip. I use Hulu mostly for “time-shifted” viewing. LIke when there are 2 or 3 shows on at the same time I want to watch and my DVR only catches one. I work evenings, so it is helpfull, but I don’t use it tyo watch old things, so I would not be for me.
in the thread a lot of people are making comments about the ad-support model of Hulu, and I would like to comment on that. I am totally willing to let HULU know I am a 38 year old single gay man, living in the NYC metro area (I think I did when I signed up) if they would target ads I MIGHT be interested in. When I watch “Brother and Sisters”, there is NO!!! reason for me to watch a feminine hygeine product ad
Wow, that’s not been my experience at all. I find it incredibly easy to go forward or back on the Netflix player…it even gives you little still snapshots as you scroll through the program to remind you visually of where you are, in addition to a time meter…and I do this with a Wiimote!!
Maybe you have bandwidth issues/slower internet connection? I have a pretty fast connection and the only wait I experience is when I fire my Wii up and wait for the machine to retrieve the content of my Instant Play queue.
Perhaps I’m simply expecting too much of the player and expecting it to act like a DVD, because I have way more control over rewinding and fastforwarding a DVD than the streamer, and DVDs also provide way more frames per second while scanning than the Netflix player does.
Barring that, I prefer players that let me click on the progress bar, which Hulu and Youtube do. Obviously, that’s not possible on the TV, but the Netflix player seems like an unhappy compromise that provides only sluggish control at best. And no, there’s nothing wrong with the speed of my connection.
Amen to that. People complain a lot about targeted advertising, but really, it’s the untargeted advertising that’s the problem. When Amazon sends me information about a new fantasy book because I’ve bought other fantasy, or when Science News sends me a subscription offer because I’ve subscribed to Scientific American, that’s not only not annoying, it’s actually useful.
I suspect lots of Misplaced Yanks around the world would be willing to pay for the service, just as many do to follow their favorite US sports teams by streaming video, but Hulu doesn’t give us that option.
Hulu’d have to broadly expand what they offer to win me away from Netflix. I already have more streamable content on deck than I know what to do with, so I can’t see paying for Hulu unless it were to replace Netflix.
Right now, I just do the Netflix single-disc plan and keep the disc in case there’s something I really want but I can’t get. So far I haven’t had to return it in about a year; I just don’t have enough time to get through everything I’d enjoy seeing.
Me too! I catch myself scouring through the Instant Watch titles, just clicking away like mad, adding more and more content…and then I’m like “Damn, I have 300 things lined up and I’ve watched about 20!”.
What kind of slows me down though is that I’ve been watching more streaming TV shows than movies, because it’s easier to quickly catch an episode of something within my daily routine than to sit and watch an entire movie for 2 or so hours.
I’m part of the Evil Empire, and believe my department is getting comped subscriptions.
So no, I won’t be paying – but even if that were not the case, I wouldn’t pay for it. I like it, but I already pay for television…I’m not paying for it again.
Targeting helps, but frequency matters more. If Amazon sent me a daily email, it’d get annoying fast. If they sent me one every month or two, I’d probably find it helpful.
Frankly, I’m surprised at how bad Hulu’s advertising is with respect to that. On a few occasions, I’ve watched (really, had on in the background) a few hours of Hulu in a row. And seen the same damned 30-second spot 4-6 times an hour. By that point, unless the ad is fantastically entertaining, I’m not buying that product purely out of spite.
Me too. I never understood the whole “Hulu is great!” thing because even with cable internet, I’ve never been able to watch anything on Hulu for more than 10 minutes without it stalling. I assume it’s a problem with Hulu itself, because I’ve watched tv shows on ABC and other networks’ sites without the same problems.
I really love how targeted facebook ads are. Recommending a fantasy book based on your last purchase is great, but facebook really takes it to the next level by only ever advertising things I expressly said I like. I mean, first of all, apparently online dating sites have bought up every single ad exposure for people who list themselves as single, because I rarely see an ad for anything else. But I love how specific they are. “Date single tennis players!” “Date this golfer hottie”. Facebook would NEVER try to send me to a online dating company that caters to bowlers because it knows I don’t bowl. If I bowled I would have told them by now.
My favorite though are the ones where the ad creative was clearly adjusted on the fly to match you personally, but the message doesn’t really come through. Like “Dating still possible at 26?” I assume the original concept was more like “still single in your 30s? Can you find love?”, and if I were in my 30s that would be an obnoxious ad to be sure. But as a single 26 year old I see that “dating still possible at 26?” ad and it’s like, uhhh… yeah it’s all going according to plan actually. Definitely planned on being single at 26 all along.
I’m really interested to see if people like you who already pay for TV continue to be the vast majority or if there’ll be a meaningful shift to people like me who get all television online in one form or another.
A few years ago I noticed I was watching hulu more and more to watch my favorite shows, because I missed them on TV. I thought about spending even more money for a Tivo or other DVR and decided I’d swing all the way in the other direction and cancel cable entirely and watch online exclusively.
Having done that, for me the decision is just whether it’d be worth paying for Hulu in addition to netflicks or if switching to Hulu would be better, or just keeping Netflicks. I agree, if I were paying for cable now I wouldn’t even consider paying for Hulu. I realize as someone who isn’t also paying for cable or satellite I’m still largely in the minority right now along with other people who don’t watch very much TV or students and other broke people who just don’t want to pay for cable. I wonder if over the next couple years hulu and netflicks will grow as a complete alternative to cable for more people rather than just an additional source to what they’re already paying for TV.
Or maybe that’s just the ad they show you over and over :). It’s happened with two different ads, neither of them for beer. I’ll not mention them here because, frankly, I don’t want them to get any more mind share than they’ve already gotten.
