There are differences: no commercials, shows on demand, more shows, and higher quality (arguably) shows. Additionally, it’s possible to just subscribe to the one service you really like because they all have a lot of content.
Anyone who watches Hulu has heard "will play with a commercial before and after the show". Hulu has been increasing the number of ads they include. It used to be ad free for many shows. Then they went to 30 second ads. Now they're stuffing 180 seconds or more on many shows.
> higher quality (arguably) shows
Definitely arguable. My feeling is the quality is going down quite a bit, but I think that's because the demand for content volume has increased (in the era of binge watching, a single TV series is started and over in one weekend).
> Additionally, it’s possible to just subscribe to the one service you really like because they all have a lot of content.
This might be true now. But there are multiple high profile streaming services launching in the next year (e.g. Disney+), which is prompting Disney to pull all content off other platforms.
> Definitely arguable. My feeling is the quality is going down quite a bit, but I think that's because the demand for content volume has increased (in the era of binge watching, a single TV series is started and over in one weekend).
Which is sad because there are plenty of better things to do than TV. I love shows as much as the next person, but if streaming really does morph back into Cable, I will just end up watching little to no TV and pirating anything I must see, which is rare. I'm already most of the way there anyhow. Life's too short for modern brainwashing via advertising. Vegetation is death.
Every time I’ve looked it’s fewer shows, though - last I checked it was only 3. They were popular ones but nothing I had any interest in, so I switched from Netflix (I was done waiting for them to let me turn off that horrid auto-preview misfeature) and I have never once seen an ad on Hulu.
FWIW, the Hulu package associated with the Disney+ option is not the "commercial free" package. So you'll have to pay a bit more with the Disney+ to retain your ad-free experience on Hulu.
Disney+ will be that one service for a lot of people. And the places they are pulling from will still have a lot to watch, e.g., people who like Netflix shows could still only subscribe to Netflix. I’m not saying that people will only subscribe to one service, just that they could get away with one $5-15/mo payment and have more good stuff to watch than they have time for, on demand. That’s really different than cable.
Ad tiers of streaming services are really cheap (approaching zero over time), so if we are looking at those, then the cost of a bunch of them is less than cable equivalent and don’t need to be better (even though they are.)
I’m pretty excited for the Disney+Hulu bundle. That and the content I get from my Prime membership (not to mention the ability to rent the odd movie/show from Amazon) is pretty close to everything I want.
Marvel/Disney/Star Wars/Simpsons... I’m good for awhile.
And yet Amazon Prime insists on showing me ads for their other shows before I can watch the one I actually tapped on to watch. Or the next episode of the show I'm watching. It really diminishes the value a lot.
Amazon's streaming platform feels like being at a used car lot, lots of dark patterns trying to get you to buy or rent, steering you away from included content.
On my TV and Chromecast the audio is also not in sync with the video. The user experience in regards to currently watched TV shows is extremely weird and I have to search them all the time with my TV remote on a bad, full-sized on-screen keyboard.
Prime Video simply feels like a bad Chinese knockoff of Netflix.
Netflix shows commercials right now; they’re just commercials for other Netflix shows. I doubt they’ll start selling the post-roll space to third parties, though, as it’s evidently more profitable for them to use that space to keep you subscribing to the service than to make a few cents for an ad placement.
As for cable-style interstitial commercials, though, the only way I could see Netflix ever doing that is if the company were to enter a Blockbuster-level tailspin. It would be selling off the core Netflix experience just to stay afloat.
It bothers me how many people think I’m psychotic when I express this opinion. Frankly, I don’t care whose content they are promoting - SOMEONE please put a fucking price tag on a service that plays exactly the content I select AND NOTHING ELSE.
Stupid semantic arguments about whether it is an ad are not are completely irrelevant to the fact that I don’t want to see content I did not pick.
Hulu has literally half a dozen old shows that they are contractually required to show an ad in front of or take down entirely. The vast, vast majority of users on the service will never see one.
It's a very different scenario to a company actively looking to increase advertising.
Hulu does offer an ad-free tier, it's like double the cost of the basic plan. I haven't sprung for it yet, but I'm sorely tempted.
I can see Netflix looking to a similar model in the future. What are they at now, $12.99? I can see the current base subscription going to $14.99, while simultaneously launching an ad-supported version priced around $7.99.
Edit: Netflix actually DOES offer a cheaper $8.99 plan currently. This one is restricted to one screen at a time, and does not offer content in HD. So if they stuck ads on it, maybe they could bring the price down to like $5.99.
YouTube 30 second preroll ads cost currently around $ 7 per 1000 views and it's decreasing. So to take Netflix from $ 14.99 to $ 7.99 per month they would have to show you around 500 minutes of ads every month. That's 33 of those 30 seconds ads every day, without skipping a day. While you still pay $ 7.99 per month as well. I don't expect consumers will accept that.
So the only way they can make an ad-supported Netflix work is to create some form of much more effective ad (which usually means taking more of your data) or attract a very specific high value audience (makes them too much of a niche player for their size)
Premium video ads sell at much higher CPM than YouTube. Hulu makes more money from users on their "with-ads" tier than on the higher-priced "ad-free" tier.
They could mess around with the amount of ad time per program and the plan price.
I think Hulu is showing at least 5 minutes of ads per 22 minute program, so watching two hours of programming would exceed the ad time you mentioned. This is reasonable for a single day, but a high bar for a daily average.
I pay for the ad-free tier but I still get ads for their live streaming service (and for their DVR, every commercial break gets replaced with 3 minutes of non-fastforwardable commercial content), which is why I'm probably going to stop using their streaming service. I really only wanted it for sports channels anyway.
I think this must be show-dependent. I, too, pay for the ad-free tier, and the most ad-like thing I've seen is a 2- or 3-second Family Guy is returning on <date> and a FOX logo interstitial at the start of streaming an episode of Family Guy. Can't recall seeing anything else across a number of shows.
It seems to be network/show-dependent. The ad-free package removes all the ads that Hulu shows, but if Fox has ads of their own they're still in there. I usually get a single FX show promo in every Simpsons episode I watch.
I have no idea. Sports events tend to be hours long, and every commercial break has these. You can technically skip a few minutes ahead, but then you miss part of the game.
Advertising is a disease, it infects and corrupts everything it touches. Often it starts when a company realizes it's another revenue stream, and adds commercials to a product people already pay for. And when there are competitors, this lets a company undercut them.
Netflix has experimented with it. They do product placement still, but the show disjointed has plain commericals. They are a tad unusual for commercials, in that they share the theme of the show.
No, but instead a pretty bad attempts at suggesting content because you happen once to watch xyz out of no reason.
> more shows
If you live in country that happens to have license agreements done well - there's still lot of content I am unable to see on Netflix in Poland because someone holds license rights for the show or movie. I'd like to see older movies, tv series - things I grow up with but instead I'm being constantly flooded with new stuff that I'm not fond of (not mention that damn autoplay preview in "header" part of Netflix in both site and applications; I really wish there would be a way to disable that "feature").
The history is quite different, the biggest difference being that there is (effectively) no geographical impediment to selling a streaming service, allowing for much more competition. Additionally, global scale allows budgets for much more content production per service/media company than used to be possible.
There's no need to be so unnecessarily condescending. Customers are used to the ad-free model and will be unlikely to accept a return to the 1/3 ads 2/3 content model of cable without significant customer attrition, which streaming services can ill afford in the current competitive landscape.
What competitive landscape? They're only competing with piracy. Movies and TV shows are mostly non-substitutable, so you almost always have a choice only between a) whichever streaming platform has an exclusive deal on streaming a given show, b) buying physical disks, and c) piracy.
Streaming services are competing with each other, even more aggressively when Disney+ appears on the scene and takes half of Netflix's content. The streaming service with no ads is going to win over the streaming service that has cable-level of ads, unless the show is so good to overwhelm that.
There are commercials on all of the "cable replacement" steaming services. I use YouTube TV and it's worse than cable. They prevent me from watching my DVR content for certain content, instead forcing me to watch the "on demand" version with unskippable ads. Comcast/Xfinity DVR never did that. The only real benefit is that it's slightly cheaper and supports multiple "profiles".
Netflix is not a "cable replacement" streaming service. Those services are the so-called VMVPDs such as PS Vue, DirecTV Now, SlingTV, YouTube TV, etc. The key characteristic of these services that differentiates them from Netflix is that they have some coverage of live TV, local TV, and/or sports.
Satellite service has, in the past, failed at local TV - but most folks view that as a cable replacement.
And like others have said, people are using Netflix to replace cable - and as such, it is a cable replacement. It isn't difficult to get some live news from major services (BBC, for example) or get some local news from local sources. I don't know much about sports as I've never really watched them - but I know in some places, you need a fairly special cable package to have good access and that sometimes, a disagreement between the networks and the cable company will keep them from you. Using sports as a marker seems pretty flimsy.
Many people cancel cable and don't subscribe to anything, and decide to read books instead, but we wouldn't call "nothing" or "reading books" a "cable replacement service"...
From the GP's comment, it's clear that the reference was to actual "cable replacement services."
DirecTV did this on their cable boxes for a few channels. I would schedule a show to record, and it would record the show during the air time to the hard drive. While the show was playing it would play off the hard drive. When the show cut to an ad break, the cable box would connect to the internet to show an unskippable ad.
I'll admit this was only on a few networks and maybe only certain programs, but overall it was a pretty poor experience.
Anyone who watches Hulu has heard "will play with a commercial before and after the show". Hulu has been increasing the number of ads they include. It used to be ad free for many shows. Then they went to 30 second ads. Now they're stuffing 180 seconds or more on many shows.
> higher quality (arguably) shows
Definitely arguable. My feeling is the quality is going down quite a bit, but I think that's because the demand for content volume has increased (in the era of binge watching, a single TV series is started and over in one weekend).
> Additionally, it’s possible to just subscribe to the one service you really like because they all have a lot of content.
This might be true now. But there are multiple high profile streaming services launching in the next year (e.g. Disney+), which is prompting Disney to pull all content off other platforms.