"In 2011, Hulu’s owners put the company up for sale and were looking for a bid of at least $2 billion; in exchange, they would offer content licenses that would run for two to three years."

"Last month, former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin submitted a starting bid of $500 million, with the understanding that he would be willing to pay more for extended licenses."

Basically, a huge chunk of Hulu's value is having a wide selection of content. At the same time the people doing the highest value licencing also own the content. Right now they can play an accounting game and lower the licencing costs to make it look profitable sell and then raise their licencing costs. Effectively it's the same money because they own the company as long as all the owners agree to a sweetheart deal. Unfortunately for them they are having some issue deciding just how much everyone should discount there content to make Hulu look better. However, nobody got suckered into there 2 billion dollar shell game.

Their content is actually not that good, and on top of it, you're forced to watch commercials as well. The service was terrible.

It makes perfect sense. Money from subscriptions is good; extra money from ads is better. And as much as you or I dislike it, we're probably in a minority position here - if it was really cutting into earnings, they'd have cut it out by now.

Granted HBO and Netflix don't have commercials but I think they also both use product placement (edit: see granddaughter comment for more info) in their original content so it's not like there's some philosophical commitment they've made to not show subscribers ads to pad the bottom line.

$8: Hulu with x ads per show.

$9: Hulu ad free.

There was a True Blood/Apple image series atop reddit not too long ago but Googling reveals that HBO insists that they don't raise money for product placement but allow writers to use products so score one for HBO.

Humorously, Apple claims they don't pay for product placement but they do give devices away which is supposed to be different I guess.

Netflix ran into problems with Lillehammer due to Norwegian law against paid placement.

House of Cards with non-paid for Apple advert below:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1537771

That means if you were watching 2 episodes a day Hulu was making more from you in a month from ads then from the Hulu Plus subscription. And I think ads have noticeably increased since 2011. I guess we know why that autoplay next episode kicks in so fast. And I guess it goes to the true cost of these licensing deals and why Netflix has a much worse tv selection that's a year old.

[1] http://www.wirelessgoodness.com/2011/02/04/hulu-generates-0-...

Most of their half hour (21 minute) shows only contain at most three minutes of commercials spread through the show. At worse you're sitting through a minute break from the show.

People pay $100+ per month and seem to live through tens of minutes of commercials per show.

Plus is about having device and HD access more than anything. I like it as I get far more content from it than I can over the air and I refuse to pay $60-100/month for cable/satellite.

For instance, I still have the jingle of this horrid local low-budget commercial from KFTY TV 50 (UHF broadcasting out of Santa Rosa, CA) in my brain: "♫ Auto body masters... EuroCal... ♫ Auto body masters... EuroCal...".

I was fucking eight. It's been thirty fucking years. And yet that crappy little jingle for a company I never used still bubbles up to the surface sometimes, in the shower or in the subway station. We all carry around these little worthless turd fossils in our heads. I noticed my friend humming McDonalds' I'm lovin' it to herself as she worked just 20 minutes ago.

Gross.

I havent seen a TV commercial in years.

We live in a world where we are constantly bombarded by information. Some of it stick to your brain whether you like it or not. Presumably the brain has a finite amount of bandwidth for processing/retaining incoming information. With that in mind, I'll do my best to avoid commercials so something from the 'useful' information streams has a better chance of sticking.

Or perhaps my brain will latch on to some other useless information. But thats ok, because adverts are the fucking bottom-feeders of the information ocean.

Commercials didnt use to annoy me that much. But for the last three years I've consumed all my TV via Netflix and online video, commercial free. Now I find commercials unbearable. Sometimes I even get angry - how dare they interrupt my immersion and enjoyment of a story? Imagine if you were reading a book and every 5 minutes some obnoxious advert interrupted you? Thats how weird it feels.

I wish there were no ads in the middle of a programme. I hate it. We live in a world of "director's cuts", so I'm surprised we still get weird stupid ads throughout a movie.

But are TV adverts really more "mentally polluting" than a 80s song or a limerick you picked up at a schoolyard? Relax everybody.

Thats a nice perspective, I might try that. The science of advertising is also interesting - these marketers spent squillions of research dollars on figuring out the most effective technique to transfer an idea/emotion/brand (essentially a meme) to your brain. Those techniques are also applicable to giving a presentation for work and public speaking. I've noticed the most successful people in the workplace are those who can 'sell' their ideas to their colleagues and managers.

But are TV adverts really more "mentally polluting" than a 80s song or a limerick you picked up at a schoolyard?

For the most case I think you're right. There is a subset of more evil adverts which attempt to play on insecurities (body image, gender roles/responsibilities, medical fearmonging). But most advertising is just...transient noise. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by banality.

I have a pet theory that our brains will retain a certain amount of useless 'mental pollution' regardless of what information streams are being thrown at it. Not because we need those little nuggets of useless information, but because they are implicit to the formation and recall of other 'useful' memories and emotions. Memory is a multi-sensory thing, regardless of what part of the memory is 'useful'.

Music is a special case, its ability to trigger episodic memories is very strong[1]. I like to think of it in computer science terms as a hash table[2]. If you spend enough time doing a certain thing whilst listening to the same music, the event is stored against the hash (music). Then in the future, listening to this music will trigger a very strong memory of that time in your life.

I spent many hours as a teenager listening to music whilst playing video games. Now if I listen to these albums, the memories instantly 'come flooding back' as the saying goes.

[1]I believe olfactory triggers are stronger than auditory triggers. Perhaps smell-o-vision advertising is the next big thing.

[2] Not a great analogy - the linking and recall is really bidirectional.

One of the reasons I stopped watching (the stand-up comedy section at the start of) late-night talk shows is because laughing meant I was inside the bubble and, in my view, part of the problem.

Also interesting to think about is if we take out the need for money (ie, in Star Trek or back when we traded things) it makes me wonder what we would be spending our time with, mentally and otherwise.

Which, while not in heavy rotation on my current playlists, would still be a big upgrade.

Speaking from a purely speculative and subjective opinion, it could be partially due to neurodiversity within the population. The root cause could be that differing clusters of people have differing cognitive processing abilities.

For example, personally I despise commercials, because they break the flow, and force a context switch. Similarly, movement on the computer screen, whilst trying to read text is highly stressful to me. For this reason, I choose to install extensions (adblockers etc) to make sure that the screen is static, and only moves when I want it to.

Some people try to control their environment, others tend to adapt. Case in point, my oldest friend, is the opposite to me, and he doesn't mind adverts, or distractions, and actually prefers to study with music playing. I'm constantly amazed how others like him, manage to blend so efficiently into the environment.

I don't subscribe to TV or Hulu or anything but Netflix for this very reason. I would cancel Netflix if they inserted ads. I would rather pay $50 a month for Netflix if that meant being ad-free.

Sorry, but I don't buy this. An episode of, say, Breaking Bad does not need several-minute "act breaks" to work, so that something will "sink in".

There is no series in existence so intellectually or emotionally overwhelming that one needs ad breaks to deal with them.

(Though admittedly I frequently have to pause shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm because I need some fresh air after all the social embarrassment, but that's different.)

I suspect that most people here with cable don't watch any commercials, due to the magic of DVR. At least, that's true for me. I can't stand not being able to skip them, so I hate Hulu.

Many people are making so much money that the cost of TV shows will never be an issue, if only someone were willing to sell it to them. They still only have 24 hours in a day, and they are being shown ads they have seen many times before, and those ads weren't interesting in the first place.

TV users can easily use a DVR to skip ads.