Hulu for pay: Subscription service reportedly begins in May

According to a Los Angeles Times report, Hulu, the online video site second only to YouTube in monthly video streams in the U.S., will roll out a subscription service as soon as May 24.

The site will continue to allow users to watch the last five episodes of the series they carry for free. If viewers want to watch beyond that, though, they would have to pay $9.95 per month.

Ultimately, the report says, even the few commercials aired on Hulu will increase to match those of network TV.

I stopped watching Hulu as soon as they cut off access from mobile phones. I watched the same commercials as I would from a laptop, so I don’t really understand what that was all about.

No way I’d pay monthly.

Here’s a tip to FReepers..HULU is hiring CSR’s to start around late May which coincides with the article’s subsription date. The human resources screener was contracted to find the best candidates and is a friend of mine. Usually, they have 3 people to answer hundreds of e-mail which is the only way to contact them.

“Ultimately, the report says, even the few commercials aired on Hulu will increase to match those of network TV.”

What a scam. I grew up in NJ where our TV antenna pulled in plenty of “free” TV. The only price was having to endure the commercials.

As an adult, I moved to an area where access to “free” TV was much more limited. So I started getting used to paying for cable. But the premise of cable is that because you were paying monthly, you didn’t have to sit through commercials.

Now I watch cable and nearly all the channels have advertising except for “premium” movie channels. Now that we’ve all been forced onto digital TVs, maybe I need to go back to an antenna. It surely wouldn’t have any more commercials than I have to watch already. And it’s “free.”

I think Hulu’s reasoning that people with $50-100 monthly cable bills might start reasoning “What the hell. For $10 a month I can pretty much watch the same shows I watch now, but watch when I want to without paying through the nose for DVR to make that happen. Moreover, even though the selection is more limited, I’ve only got so many hours in the day. So for the same price I now pay to NetFlix, I can watch TV and movies too.”

I moved back to antenna about 12 years ago. Free is a good price. The digital transition has added many new channels and the HD channels look great.

I get about 30 seperate channels now. I have an HD tuner on the computer and anything I want to record, I just point and click and it is ready for me to watch when ever I want in full quality with no pausing to refresh the buffer. I can skip over all of the commercials.

I can edit out the commercials, convert to MP4 and save hundreds of shows on a portable USB drive which Plugs directly into the TV to watch on the big screen or take with me.

I can also convert any of my video to watch on the phone. I can burn DVDs for the kids to watch in the van. ATSC is much more flexible than Cable or Sattelite.

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