Hulu Plus Review - why I canceled almost instantly

We signed up for the one week trial of Hulu Plus. If you've never heard of it, it's Netflix's primary competition for streaming content - TV and movies. The major difference is that Hulu Plus is more current, but it also carries advertising. Pricing is the same.

I won't drag out the suspense: after watching just one episode of one show, my wife and I looked at each other and we both knew we wouldn't be watching another. I picked up my iPad, logged into my newly created Hulu Plus account, and canceled the subscription.

We'd had it less than twenty four hours. If we had gotten around to actually using it sooner, we wouldn't have had it that long.

I doubt that we are the only people who have done this. I rather suspect that many people would follow the same path. Perhaps we can save you some time and trouble?

Signup and activation

I understand the rationale of requesting a credit card for a free one week trial. I don't like it - I really think an email address should be sufficient, but I guess when you have a substandard service, its helpful to do it this way - some people may forget to cancel in time.

What annoyed me more was that the activation on our Roku required me to login with the account and password I had created at their website. Other services have a page where you can request an activation code that you then type into the device or the device could give you a code you type at the website. Typing a long email address and password is clumsy when you have to move through a grid of letters with arrow keys.

Strike one, but I knew we'd never have to do that again, so I wasn't very upset.

Actually, that was strike two

Or you might say that my wife and I were both at strike one.

After I had signed us up, my wife went searching for shows we might like to watch. She was immediately disappointed in that she actually only found two. She also complained bitterly about the search/browse interface, because it showed her too much that we definitely did NOT want to see. We aren't interested in silly "clips" from shows and if we ever were, we'd want to search those separately. Mixing that stuff in with the TV shows was highly annoying.

What was even more annoying was their sloppiness about dates. We recently began watching "Parenthood" on Netflix and had exhausted all that was available there. Netflix tells you the season, the episode number and the date, but Hulu Plus doesn't seem to care about dates at all. It's also not clear when you click on "Add All to Queue" if you are adding just one season or all available. We sighed and figured we'd find out when we got to the TV.

Screen assumptions

Are we the only ones who haven't bought a monster HD TV yet? Hulu Plus seems to think so. Sitting at our normal viewing distance from our ancient 27 inch tube set, neither of us could read any of the text on the screen or make out the details of the jumbled bunch of show icons they stuffed into that space.

I had to stand up and move closer before I could go to the items my wife had saved in the queue. Once there, I wasn't particularly surprised that everything was still too small to read and that they still weren't going to tell me what year we had picked out. It turned out that we did have the right season of "Parenthood", so I clicked on the first episode and we began watching.

Sixty second commercials

I knew that Hulu Plus has ads on recent TV shows, so that wasn't unexpected. What I didn't expect was how annoying sixty seconds worth of commercials is. If we have to have commercials, I'd much rather have three or four minutes at a stretch, giving me time to go grab an apple or visit the bathroom. Sixty seconds is not enough time and the breaks were far too frequent.

That's probably not Hulu's fault. I imagine the people who own the shows insist upon that or they simply insist upon so much money that Hulu has to jam a lot of ads in to make this possible. It's too many for us - we did watch the entire episode, but we couldn't take another - we'll wait until it gets to Netflix.

Disappointed

Given the high amount of annoyance, I couldn't recommend this to anyone. Hulu asked about that when I canceled; on a scale of zero to ten for "Likely to recommend", I had to give it zero.

They also asked why we canceled. "I don't like advertising' was the closest choice, but really it was only that we don't like too much advertising in short bursts. That was the deal breaker.

We are disappointed. We will have to wait some time to catch up with the series we have been enjoying on Netflix.

Greed

It is interesting to think what a TV show might cost without advertising.

A typical prime time show might carry 15 minutes of advertising per hour. At $100,000 and up for a 30 second spot, that's several million dollars per show. However, first time viewership, although declining, still runs five million and up. Add in re-runs and the cost per viewer drops well below a dollar.

But why is so much money needed anyway? The actual cost of a prime time show is only $1 to $2 million per episode and the technology needed is becoming less expensive every year. What isn't inexpensive is what is paid to actors, directors and the rest - there is a tremendous amount of greed at play here. That greed came from the advertising model - because advertisers were willing to pay more and more to reach those millions of viewers, more and more money was available for actors, directors, writers and so on.

As more and more of us switch to digital viewing at our own chosen times, the money available may decrease. Whether this will impact quality remains to be seen, but I would think that the future might look quite rosy for actors who will not insist upon multi-million dollar contracts.

The trend is obvious: we don't want intrusive advertising and we don't want high subscription fees. Broadcast channel viewers are declining rapidly - the status quo cannot continue indefinitely. Change will have to come.