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Comment by secstate | Hacker News Reader

LOL. And then if you're Hulu, start cramming ads back into paying users' faces. I miss the days when people threw sledghammers into giant TV screens to free us from this hell. Or was that a movie?

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This will sound like I'm playing devil's advocate, but it's a serious question. Hulu Plus theoretically works an awful lot like a DVR from your cable/satellite company (we'll come back to the "theoretically" in a moment): watch new shows the day after they aired, as many as you want. Plus a lot of back catalog stuff, plus weird independent stuff that they bring in. Not for cable or satellite prices of $100+ a month (and that's not counting "premium" channels like HBO), not even for the promotional special prices of ~$30 a month, but for $7.99 a month, and with about half as many ads, given that Hulu's breaks are 60-90 seconds instead of 2-4 minutes.

I don't know. On the surface, isn't that kind of an amazing improvement?

Coming back to the "theoretically," the problems I see with Hulu are certainly driven by stupid contractual obligations: they usually only have the last five episodes of any given series, so if you want to start watching something halfway through the season you're out of luck; they sometimes don't have rights to stream things on Hulu Plus that they do on normal Hulu, which is banana crazypants; and of course, there are shows and even whole networks they don't carry. But out of all the issues with Hulu, I'm not sure their failure to give us everything commercial free is actually that outrageous.

Hulu's breaks are steadily increasing in length. First it was 30s, then 45-60s, now it's typically 120-145s. I avoid Hulu now if there's any other way to watch a show.

Is it still the same ad played over and over during the same break? Just 8 times now instead of 4?

No, they're up to three different ads. It's just that it's the same three ads every break. :)

Hey, it's an improvement. Last time I used Hulu (admittedly a while ago) it was "T-MOBILE T-MOBILE T-MOBILE T-MOBILE T-MOBILE T-MOBILE. It goes fast like this pink motorcycle! T-MOBILE."

I don't know about the timelines in the US, but I do know that here in Australia, cable TV initially had one major thing going for it: you didn't get ads during a show. You'd get ads between shows to round out the minutes, and usually not for commercial products, but not during the show.

It didn't take long for them to stop that practice, which perplexed me - what was the point in getting a basic cable TV package then? You directly pay them and they still cram just as many ads into the timeslots?

> what was the point in getting a basic cable TV package then?

Because people would still pay for it.

Sure, for the business. But I meant as a consumer - why pay for a basic package when the experience is the same as free-to-air?

I actually asked some engineers at Hulu about this during a job interview, specifically about the fact that the same commercial often plays three or more times during a single show. They understood the problem but apparently companies pay for spots on certain shows. Thats why you only see the jack links commercial on tosh's animated show (no one else wants to advertise on it).

Not sure if you're being sarcastic with that reference, but that was actually an ad. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R706isyDrqI

It's not like Apple has ads in their video service today, for their part :)

Oh god, Archer.

Since FX took over in S4, their iTunes versions have between sandwiched with ads for other FX programs. ADS IN FULL-PRICED iTUNES DOWNLOADS.

Filled me with such rage.

The best part? Those ads exist in pirated versions on the newsgroups as well!

What people fail to understand or see or ack is that there is enough to do all the things...

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