Free hulu plus for xbox live members (both silver and gold) this week only
- Thread starter eastmen
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I find it mind-numbingly frustrating. I'm currently getting the one month free and I'm not sure I'm going to be continuing once the month is done. The way Netflix handles TV shows is some couple orders of magnitude better so as it stands I think I'm going to continue with Zune Marketplace and Netflix.
I concur. Hulu plus is an entirely frustrating experience for me. The fact I have to pay for commercials blows my mind. Plus whenever you need to launch something and skip to later, you get bombarded with additional commercials.
Maybe a silly question, but I'm a UK'er and (other than no ability to get Hulu anyway) even though I have to pay a significant amount of money a month for Cable, I'm still forced to watch commercials on those channels I am paying a fee for.
In the US does this not happen? Is cable 'commercial free'?
It isn't even so much the commercials (though I will say WHEN they occur baffles me as well...), I mean even the navigation is insane. When I go to Networks in Zune Marketplace I see what I expect NET.WORKS. when I go to Networks in HuluPlus, holy hell...these jokers list damn near every DISTRIBUTOR as a network
what makes it even MORE frustrating is knowing who owns Hulu.As for Netflix and Hulu, originally, I thought that maybe Netflix decided to go with "Suggestions" but now I'm realizing that this was clearly the direction that Microsoft has posited as a good idea. Sure in Zune Marketplace where people may not own any movies (I do) I can see how/why movie suggestions for rentals is a good idea but for Netflix and Hulu which both have queues...no, at least not as the ONLY option.
I've been complaining about the Video and Zune implementations for years it seems like no one at MSFT uses this product; I'd love to get a connect invite so I could give input.
I take your meaning and understand but the market has shown a viable alternative. If people are moving towards Netflix and away from cable then replicating cable may not be the wisest of moves. Hulu is owned by media conglomerates which have shown their obstinate nature in the past.
EDIT: What is also frustrating is knowing that the hulu+ doesn't even net me/us all of what hulu has it isn't really a "plus" to me. As I have said before after all the drama we went through putting Hard Boiled in Stranglehold I'm acutely aware of distribution rights and the bat-shit insane way media executives think.
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I've found that there are way more of my shows set up as "Web Only" & can't even watch them on Hulu Plus. Of the 13 shows I'm subscribed to only 3 of them support Hulu Plus. I've decided I'm not paying $8 a month for a service where I can't even watch my shows on the Xbox. I'm going to continue using PlayOn for Hulu & TheCW & Netflix for everything else. Kinda of sad really. I wanted to quit using PlayOn because of the continual updates & the lack of rewinding/fast forwarding & having to sometimes restart from the beginning even if I have a few minutes left in the show. Almost convinced the wife it was almost worth paying $8 a month. But not now. I guess I'll put up with it because there's no other alternative. Pathetic actually. Even a little funny. They bring out Hulu Plus to help compete with Netflix & they're still driving people away. LOL
Tommy McClain
Tommy McClain
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of commercials (and in the UK we are nowhere near as bombarded by them as you are in the US) but I see the need for them in the efforts to commission and pay for original programming.
Netflix only regurgitates existing media, often long after it was originally shown on either the big screen or on ad-supported cable. Because of that the costs are predictable and limited. The big media companies don't have the same luxury, with advertising being the major component in funding original content, with good quality programming costing between $4 and $6m per-episode.
While you may well be right to say that Hulu 'replicating cable' may not be ideal, to call Netflix and its ilk 'a viable alternative' is maybe stretching it a little too far.
As an aside, many of us seem to be happy to pay a subscription for online gaming and other 'bonuses' such as week-early demo's, even though we are forced to navigate through an advert-filled GUI.
I so despise "it's a 1.0 product" well...ok...except your COMPETITION has already given you a guideline from which to build. The PLATFORM HOLDER has already given you a basis from which to build. Saying "remember guys the original..." well guess what that was years (plural) ago!
Rotmm said:
Hulu already exists in its ad supported free form, I guess I don't see why its hard to understand why those who would subscribe to the paid version would expect that their monthly payment would cover the costs of lost advertising dollars. We could argue all day about "current seasons" being a value add but you get the current seasons with the free service with the exception being fewer episodes are available. If you're the type of person that keeps up-to-date with shows or have friends that are always talking about what happened last night and you don't want to miss out on the conversation then plus is of a seriously limited value.
In my household we are almost always behind sometimes a season or more, in this instance Netflix is great for us since we find older shows that are of interest to us (through happenstance), and then we run through them and typically catch up to a current season which by that time will have already made its way to mid-season in that case hulu plus might have been a value add except we are oft met with "Web Only" which in turn means I could be paying $0 and watching from the web or since I bought a lifetime subscription (maybe it was annual) to playon premium I could always watch that way. Now clearly it isn't about the money for me because I pay 240 points ($3 assuming non-discounted/free points) per HD episode of current shows (the Season Passes so far have sucked in terms of pricing so I have only done maybe three of those) and I have a VERY long list of tv episodes I have purchased.
What I really have a problem with is the suggestion that somehow turning on my 360 and the landing tile being Spotlight is somehow comparable to being in the middle of Lie to Me and a dancing big foot appears on screen at a point in time that was clearly not what would have been scheduled on network television.
EDIT: I want to comment on the " a little too far", I find that to be crazy talk
one of the largest revenue generators for media is syndication.EDIT2: How timely
On bloomberg radio the last couple days the personalities were rather in awe that Netflix now has more subscribers than Comcast which is our largest cable provider by far but the knock from people especially Michael Pachter is that their subscription growth has slowed and their content costs have increased.Reed Hastings said:
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I concur. I don't understand the mentality that rolls out an effectively broken product/service, discourages its customers, and then tries to patch it up to something serviceable. It'd be better to withhold release until a better product was available so customers will be recommending it to friends instead of warning against said product. My initial experiences with PS Home mean I have no interest now in trying it again, despite whatever investments Sony have made to improve it.I so despise "it's a 1.0 product" well...ok...except your COMPETITION has already given you a guideline from which to build. The PLATFORM HOLDER has already given you a basis from which to build. Saying "remember guys the original..." well guess what that was years (plural) ago!
Similar with movie rentals on PS3. We went looking for "Hot Fuzz" one evening on PSN and LoveFilm, which took a bit of faff in the end, and couldn't find it to rent. Interest in trying those services again took a nosedive.
I encountered very similar situation as well. I was considering going with Hulu Plus on the XB360 but too many of the shows I would watch are "Web Only'. I don't know WTF is up with that, other than it becoming a definitive no-upgrade for me. I'll continue to watch those same exact shows through other means.
I turned my console parental controls back on and in Hulu Plus things tagged with NSFW still appear...I recognize that this is not a standard rating but if you actually took the time to label a title NSFW then I don't know maybe code your app such that when parental controls are on and EXPLICIT is blocked and UNRATED is blocked and TV is set to TV-14 that maybe just MAYBE you could do like Netflix and show the child lock and I can enter my code to watch the title or like Zune Marketplace and hide the title altogether (I actually hate this since some of the shows I watch like Burn Notice don't appear when I have 'UNRATED - BLOCKED" turned on because the root level shows UNRATED or UR but the individual episodes show TV-14...) anyway both of those are better than the crap Hulu has rolled out. Instead of dealing with Hulu Plus I just went ahead and purchased a Season Pass for Modern Family.
Even with that I was still willing to give Hulu Plus another shot when I saw another of our shows was listed went to watch and yay, "Web Only" ...this is a new season and you can't secure new rights for a new season, ok, another Season Pass purchased on Zune.
Listening to Bloomberg radio last night and the new guys running Miramax seem to be the only ones in the industry who get it (I'm speaking to more than just their Netflix deal) the rest of the film/video world would do well to figure out how to come around to "new" technology and distribution rights need to be completely overhauled but this does not absolve Hulu from making a better app nor does it absolve them from securing content in a manner that makes said content ubiquitous amongst their offerings.
Even with that I was still willing to give Hulu Plus another shot when I saw another of our shows was listed went to watch and yay, "Web Only" ...this is a new season and you can't secure new rights for a new season, ok, another Season Pass purchased on Zune.
Listening to Bloomberg radio last night and the new guys running Miramax seem to be the only ones in the industry who get it (I'm speaking to more than just their Netflix deal) the rest of the film/video world would do well to figure out how to come around to "new" technology and distribution rights need to be completely overhauled but this does not absolve Hulu from making a better app nor does it absolve them from securing content in a manner that makes said content ubiquitous amongst their offerings.
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