You Do Hulu?

I haven’t had cable television since 1999.  My family went without for about a month in the late 90’s, so as a working man in my household, I decided to sign up for satellite service.  It was glorious when it wasn’t raining …so, you know, the winter.

 After the WCW was purchased and completely dismantled by what was the WWF, I decided that it wasn’t worth paying for any more, so I got rid of it.

I was at a point in my life where entertainment was easy to come by.  Video games, the newfangled DVDs, and over the air TV got me through until the weekend, when I would go to the theater and watch one or more movies.

The digital age beckoned and with it the promise of crystal clear television reception with the help of HD tuners.  For whatever reason, these tuners never worked well with any of the televisions I owned, even the new Vizio 1080p HDTV that I currently use, so I was pretty much out of luck when it came to network television.

As a reaction, my wife and I subscribed to the Blockbuster rental service and we were able to see as many movies as we wanted to as long as we drove to Blockbuster and got them.

Being broke necessitated that a change be made.  Blockbuster had decided to raise the rates on the rental subscriptions, so we decided to try out the lower cost option of Netflix.  

Netflix proved to be good enough for the price and we went exclusively with them for our DVD rentals.

A few months later, Netflix became an app on the Xbox 360 so that I could stream some videos directly to my TV without having to wait for the physical disk to get to me.

 

This pleased me greatly.

At first there wasn’t too much content and it wasn’t a very intuitive experience, but with each Xbox update, the app was improved.

During this whole time frame, there has been a supplemental experience that I was using to see the latest network and cable TV that I wasn’t getting through Netflix, and that was Hulu.

At the peak of me using the computer based site, I was using Hulu frequently to catch up on “The Simpsons”, “Ghost Hunters”, and “Hell’s Kitchen”.  Ever since the inclusion of “Hulu Plus”, I decided not to use it any more as the frequency of the commercials had gotten pretty bad and the backlog of episodes available to basic users had shrunk.

When Microsoft allowed Xbox users to try out the “Plus” app for free, I jumped at the chance and was excited to dig into my old shows again.

The problem with this idea is that when I searched for “Ghost Hunters”, it advised me that I could only watch it at a computer.

What?  Why the heck would you split up the content available for your product?  The idea that I would be paying extra so that I could use a gimped version of Hulu on my TV is absolutely ludicrous to me.

I figured that this was some sort of fluke, so I continued searching.

“Hell’s Kitchen”, online only.

“The Simpsons”, online only.

Wow.  What is wrong with these people at Hulu?  Why can’t I watch the content that I want to watch WHERE I want to watch?  I’m sure that this has to do with the licensing and it wouldn’t be that big of an issue if they told you about it before signing up.  

What kind of pitch meeting could that have been?

-“Hey, I have an idea on how to make more money off of this Hulu thing!”

-“Great, give it to me!”

-“Alright, now picture this: Have customers pay a monthly fee to watch our content on their TVs!”

-“Genius! We can develop the apps in a few weeks!  We just have to get all of the shows to…”

-“Oh, no…not ALL of the shows!  Just the programs that are available online for free anyway from other sources.”

-“Ok…I guess that would work and I suppose we won’t have commercials, so we have to…”

-“Oh, no, there would be commercials…”

-“sigh”

That’s right.  Not only can I not watch all of the shows available, but we also have to sit through commercials.  Even broadcast television allows you to skip commercials nowadays, but here we are paying extra to watch these shows, most of which are already free online in other places, network TV you can get over the air, or available on Netflix sans commercials.

The worst part of the whole thing is the fact that it’s about the same price as a subscription to Netflix.  So you get less content, more restrictions, and commercials for the same cost as your closest competitor. 

Remarkable.

To be fair, there are a lot of good points with Hulu as well.  The picture quality is top notch, the sorting is easy to understand, and you get a lot of shows the day after broadcast.  

These good qualities are unfortunately underscored with the fact that there are only a few shows WORTH the expense of seeing it the day after, like “Bones”, and “Glee” (shush, I like it).  

I would have mentioned “The Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” as I was enjoying them quite a bit while I was under the free trial; however, when I tried to watch “The Daily Show” this morning, all I got was ,”Available Online Only”.

Sigh.

NOTE: In Hulu's defense, The Daily Show eventually allowed me to stream it once more.