January 12, 2015 Gripe Alert: Hulu Edition
I try to be mostly positive here on zwolanerd, but every so often I’ve got to gripe about something because I just can’t not gripe about it, so please bear with me.
Last summer I got a free 3-month subscription to Hulu Plus because… I don’t remember. Because Xbox One, I think. I watched a few things on it and then my wife and I started watching Community because she’d never seen it. I have seasons 1-3 on DVD, but Hulu had all of the seasons and it’s easier to watch without having to swap out DVDs, you know? We didn’t get through it all before the free trial ran out, so we ended up buying two more months at something like $8 or $9 a month, I’m not really sure. Somewhere along the line in those months, I started watching Red Dwarf, and then used it to watch a few new Fall shows that I was curious about, but not curious enough about to set the TiVo for. I still haven’t finished Red Dwarf, but I’ve been using the service for around 7 months now.
Gripe #1: Commercials
Why am I paying $8-9 a month for this if I still have to watch commercials? I’m basically paying twice (once in money, once in time) for the show. Three times if you want to count my Internet connection.
Gripe #2: Selection
Why am I limited to the last five episodes of a currently running show? I’m sure this is some sort of licensing deal, but if they’re getting my monthly money and the money from commercials, I assume the showrunners are getting paid somewhere along the line.
Gripe #3: Limitations
This one made me grrrrrr loudly and long enough to hurt my throat a little. I went to watch the season premiere of Cougar Town last week on my TiVo. Since I had the season pass set up, I knew it would grab it and I’d catch up with it whenever. It turns out that when we re-did our cable bill last summer, the new package we have doesn’t include TBS. Weird, right? I thought TBS came with just about everything. So the TiVo recorded a half hour of black screen, which works as a screen saver but not much else.
No big deal, I’ll watch it on Hulu. I searched for Cougar Town on the Xbox One Hulu app and… nothing. Weird.
I go online and search for Cougar Town on the Hulu website. There it is. But wait! “Please select your cable provider and sign in.” I see where this is going. “We’re sorry, your current cable subscription doesn’t include this channel, so we can’t show it to you.”
ASDAHDFKLSADGHASF:FASDFK
Again, I’m sure there’s some kind of licensing thing here, but I assume TV networks want to make money, so why are they making it so difficult? Very frustrating.
So the short version is: once my current month is up, I don’t think I’ll be paying for it anymore. I just gotta finish Red Dwarf first.
Written by: Mark
- 4 comments
- Posted under TV
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Joe
said
I think it’s unacceptable to be paying Hulu a fee to watch TV, and the show that they’re streaming isn’t available because you don’t pay for the TV channel.
Absolutely unacceptable.
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Bishma
said
Along the lines of #3 is that hulu plus sometimes doesn’t have all the stuff that free hulu does because they can get rights to stream to a browser but not to a TV. We did the free month (or two weeks or whatever it is) a while back and had trouble finding things to watch and never went back.
What are your thoughts (knowing no one has actually seen it yet) of SlingTV? It is supposed to have TBS BTW.
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Mandy
said
Wow, #3 is definitely enough reason to let them go. Why pay an additional $9/month if they’re only going to show you what you can catch on cable anyway? Ridiculous.
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Joe
said
I’m very interested in Sling TV and will try it out for a few months when it’s available. I’m a former cable cutter, and we’ll be cutting the cable again shortly.
We’ve discovered that when we’re finally able to watch TV, there’s really nothing we want to watch that’s on. We don’t pay for DVR, so we usually resort to Netflix anyway. My wife likes live TV a couple times during the day but they’re broadcast channels that we can pickup with an antenna.