[chjohasbrouck]

A couple years ago I was watching Hulu and noticed the ads always felt like they took much longer to play than they should.

I got out my iPhone and timed the seconds as they counted down during ad time on Hulu. Each second of ad time on Hulu took 1.34 seconds of actual time to pass. They were telling you for example, that there were 2 minutes of ads about to play, but the 120 second countdown would actually take 160 seconds to pass.

I stopped watching Hulu altogether after that discovery. I think I checked back in more recently and they had stopped doing that, but it's still a little telling about where their head is at regarding ads and their customers.

[tracker1]

I remember when Hulu first started, loved it, loved the idea.. at the time there was only one ad per adslot on shows, so the ratio of ads to content was much better. The down side was If you watched a few shows, you'd see the same ad about half the time, which got tiresome.

All around I'm disappointed to see content getting pushed farther down, to where several shows are now 41-42 minutes of content for an hour program, where it used to be closer to 48. I don't mind paying for content so much, but would rather not have to go to half a dozen places to get it... HBO, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon... what's next? I wouldn't mind paying the $50/month it costs combined if there was one place to watch everything ad-free.

I'm really surprised that Disney hadn't bought a stake in Netflix earlier on, as a lot of their family & children's content is very popular on the site.

[CaptSpify]

Youtube uses some magical time calculation as well. When I watch on my roku it says "you can skip this ad in 5 sec", it usually takes ~7-10 for it to pop-up.

[CaptSpify]

I just timed this, and yes, it took 10 seconds for the 5-second skip to pop-up

[cableshaft]

Hah! I always thought their second counter counted down kind of slow. Glad to have it confirmed. For several reasons I dislike Hulu and I haven't used their service for a few years now.