Hulu Plus Equals Disappointment

I started watching Hulu.com in the fall of 2007.  Prior to finding Hulu.com, I had a Cable TV subscription, a DVR, and a bit of a love/hate relationship going with Netflix.  A little less than three years have gone by and I still find myself still watching Hulu.com and Netflix, but have dropped the DVR and most of the Cable TV subscription package. 

Over the course of this year I have read various reports about the Hulu paid-subscription service, now called Hulu Plus.  Upon first hearing about Hulu Plus, my reaction was not a negative one.  I have watched quite a few TV series on Hulu and have seen their service evolve over the last couple of years.  I thought that a paid Hulu Plus subscription service could be good.  The Hulu Plus service that I was hoping to find was one where I could pay Hulu.com a monthly subscription fee and in return the would remove the commercial breaks, provide access more content/episodes and have a shorter wait time for new episodes.

On June 29th, I saw that Hulu was taking requests for Hulu Plus Subscriptions and put my name in.  About a month later, on July 31st, I received an email from Hulu which stated that my "Hulu Plus preview invite was ready".  I happily clicked the link and found that Hulu Plus was looking for me to pony-up a $9.99 per month subscription fee with no trial period. 

Like many other folks wandering around the web, I have signed up for a vast number of betas, trials, and previews over the last few years.  I find that it is normally not a good sign when I receive an invite to something that is looking for an immediate commitment, along with a credit card number.  As I had been looking forward to Hulu Plus, I chose to go against my own best judgement and sign up for the Hulu Plus service. 

Upon logging into the Hulu Plus for the first time as a paid subscriber, I noticed that the single biggest change to the Hulu interface was that the logo in the upper-left corner now read "Hulu Plus" instead of just the regular "Hulu".   I looked for was some type of Hulu Plus related navigation that would take me to my additional content, but found nothing.  I reached for the "Plus" option in the navigation bar, but found that it just lead me to the same ad that I saw before I joined Hulu Plus.  It had links to some additional "plus" content, but mostly it was episodes that I had already seen on Hulu over the course of the last season or two.  After wandering about the site, I did find that there was some additional content but not nearly what I had expected.

The biggest disappointment of the Hulu Plus service came when I watched my first episode and found that there were still commercial breaks.  In fact, I was still presented with five commercial breaks featuring a couple of ads at each break.  It is simply amazing to me that someone at Hulu decided that I would be willing to both pay for the Internet Service (via cable modem) and the Hulu Plus subscription and then on top of that, I would be willing to sit through commercial breaks.

At this point, the end result of my Hulu Plus experience is that I simply do not know why anyone would opt for the paid version of the Hulu service.  I am about three weeks into the first paid month of my Hulu Plus subscription and I find it highly unlikely that there will be a second paid month.

To Cable TV or Not to Cable TV

Last week I called Comcast and requested that they downgrade my cable television service from the Digital Classic package to broadcast channels only. This is a rather fun conversation to have with the Comcast folks. Their procedure seems to require that they escalate the call at least twice to give a couple of supervisors a chance to talk the caller out of this decision. Despite their efforts, I prevailed and the service has been downgraded. This downgrade will save us about $50/mo.

Gone are the satellite channels and the on-demand service. What remains are just the channels that I would be able to receive with an antenna, if I had a desire to put one on my house. The trick now will be to adjust my viewing habits to the remaining service.

My first trial was making it through the first round of the baseball playoffs. This year the games were broadcast on TBS only, which is not part of the service package that I currently have access to. I had to rely on the radio and the pitch by pitch updates on my phone to follow the progress of the Red Sox. For the next round of the playoffs, I will likely be seeking out a neighborhood bar.

For my other TV viewing needs, I have been looking towards Hulu.com. Hulu has a large quantity of television series available on-demand. Thus far I have worked my way through the first few episodes of 'Fringe' and have caught up on a couple of episodes of 'Bones' that I missed.

The interesting thing here is that you cannot just flip through channels. After choosing a program, you have to wait a minute for it to start and then enjoy the program. Hulu does have ads, but I cannot say that I mind watching four 30-second spots over the course of a 45 minute show when I would have to endure 15 minutes of ads if I was watching it on TV.

My ultimate goal here is to actually start reading a bit more and maybe visit the town library from time to time, but I have to say that it is nice to be able to look to the internet to help wean me from my tv habit.