Hulu Plus

The much rumored subscription plan for Hulu is now launching. $9.99 a month for access to the entire season, and for some shows, the full back catalog. Access on the iPhone, iPad, PS3, Samsung BluRay players and other devices. Also the 360, but only if you also pay the MS $50 a year Live tax. And 720p feeds, though no info on quality.

This is really tempting for me, though it's a shame certain shows pulled out of Hulu before this happened, like The Daily Show and other Comedy Central shows. Would just be nice to have one place to go for everything.

http://hulu.com/plus

The way you said it, it sounds like $10 per month per show, but it seems to be just $10 a month for their entire catalog.

Discussion thread on the Roku forum, and rumored possible future support based purely on a survey drop down, which really means nothing.

Is there still advertising?

And it's astonishing to me that Hulu is even considering coming to boxes. I'd bet that the networks running it will still refuse Boxee just out of spite.

Bah, the hell with you, Hulu. I've never liked the service because I simply don't ever want to watch TV and movies on my computer. Now they're coming to a bunch of home theater devices that I don't have. I'll skip it.

There is still advertising from what I understand, much like how cable has ads too. Being that I don't subscribe to any other television service, Hulu looks promising.

Cable does have ads, and I can skip them. At the very least, I can pause them, which I can't do on Hulu, so you'll have to pause before or after the break if you want to make a bathroom run. *edit* and I know that skipping them means I'm not really supporting the content, but that's still how it is for me */edit*

The only reason I could see paying for this service is if you don't have another TV subscription. And I don't see myself dropping my service for this if it doesn't have all the shows I watch.

I think my biggest objection to all of this is that the studios are getting even more control over their content, and that has never meant good things for the consumer, IMO. Now they'll be even less likely to give their content to companies like Netflix, which is my preferred way to watch VOD. The only problem with it is that the content is lacking, and that's entirely the fault of the studios.

This could be a good alternative for those people who can't or won't set up an ATSC-based PVR. $10 per month is a decent price considering the content they have available. You still have to wait until the morning after broadcast, but chances are your torrent or rapidshare download (in case of a missed show/episode) wouldn't be available before then either.

I think one additional noteworthy concern of course is ISP bandwidth caps. You can't forget that you're also paying to download the data - and since you can't store it locally, you might be doing it multiple times for some content.

Chances are higher that it's available within a couple hours of airing.

Is this the same Bruno who said and also?

Yes, I know, it's a bit of apples and oranges, here you're talking about content, and before it was about index to content, but the end result is the same, you pay a fee and receive programming.

tanstaafl.