After months of hearing about Hulu: Plus and it’s the future of TV I finally found a use for it on my Parents TV. They really enjoy Kitchen Nightmares but missed the mid-season premier on Friday night. They already have a Roku box I got them for Netflix and other web tv so I decided to give Hulu Plus a try so they could watch Kitchen Nightmares on the TV.

So I signed up for Hulu Plus in under five minutes and got it running on the Roku. But that is where the frustration started. First I tried to find the show and ran into the slightly clunky interface, yes it looks slick but I go into browse TV and I get a basic A-Z listing of every show they have. So I went to K and could not find it. So I searched using the D-Pad to enter in the type which I have always thought is one of the worse user interface components I have seen. But the UI is not the biggest issue.

Huge Problem #1: Content Restrictions

Kitchen Nightmares was not on Hulu Plus for TV! So I signed up for a premium service and a pretty standard show is only available to watch on my computer. Obviously they must be a licensing restriction with FOX or the distributor of the show, and Hulu caved and said ok we will not show this.

The fact that Hulu seems to have cable and content executives all over the place with their fingers in the pie makes me nervous for the future of the product. The networks are going to make Hulu so convoluted that noone will care about it. There should be two services:

• Hulu Free: Web only all the same content as plus, but only the latest episodes and not high def. They will still make their money from the ads.
• Hulu Plus: Web and TV plus complete archives of most shows and in high def.

Now it would seem that Hulu is already fractured into three types of content, Hulu Free, Hulu Plus, and Hulu Web Only no TV. The customer should no be burdened with tracking what shows they can and can not watch and where.

Huge Problem #2: Quality

So I was pissed off about Kitchen Nightmares, but I thought I would try something else they watch. My mother wanted to watch the latest Supper Nanny, so ok I pulled that up and started playing. The damn thing pops up with the huge black bars on both sides of the screen just like ten years ago when HDTV just came out. I am not used to seeing that crap from any modern show, and there is no reason why a show being produced today should ever be shown in 4:3 aspect ratio.

For stuff like reality tv I do not care if it’s high def or not, but there is no reason for the picture not to fill the screen.

Huge Problem #3: Ads

The Ads on Hulu are starting to get worse all the time. First there were just a few ads now and again. Now it seems that even short clips have pre-roll ads, and I have started to notice commercial breaks now have multiple ads. Before it was just single ads for approximately 30 seconds.

Currently the ads are still not a deal breaker, but the rate that Hulu is adding new spots to their shows is a trend I personally do not like to see.

Hulu’s a No Go

After just a few hours of playing with Hulu Plus I am already ready to cancel it again before they try and bill me after the free 1-week trial. It really is a shame because from what I hear from lots of tech news sources Hulu is our best chance at getting new content on the web in a timely manner. Now we will just have to hope that Netflix can hold out and not allow the current TV monopolies to ruin the future of web based TV.