Once upon a time, I was so frustrated with the Hulu executives that I wanted to take a baseball bat to their heads. To make such a great site with great content but no matter what require me to watch ads? If I become a member and pay you $7.99 a month I would get the privilege of being able to watch Hulu on other devices but I would still have to watch ads? Then finally they decided to offer $11.99 ad-free streaming. While I am still not pleased with the price, at least now it is an option.
Unlike the other site’s I reviewed Hulu is not just an anime streaming site. The real strength with Hulu is the next day access to a lot of currently airing tv shows in the US with no ads and it also has a good Kdrama selection to boot with no ads. Combine this with an excellent library of anime, dash in a few Simulcasts, no ads and you have a very good site. Hulu’s site is responsive and I have never had a problem with lag.
As you can tell I hated ads on Hulu. Watching an hour long drama was absolute torture with the number of ads that damn site required, it would extend the time to a torturous 1 hour and 45 minutes on average, yeah that’s right, I timed it. It’s still beyond me why they required a 5-10 minute long ad session why the rest of the streaming industry would stop at reasonable 1-2 minutes.
Currently, I have two minor annoyances with Hulu. The first is the price for ad-free streaming is a little high, $11.99 is a few dollars above the industry standard and it’s still ridiculous that they require you to pay for the privilege of using Hulu on something other than a computer. My 2nd annoyance has to do with the constant selection changes. One tv series will have all 7 seasons available and then a month later it will only have the last 4 seasons available. It also is constantly removing entire series from the catalog, even if that series is less than a year old. I was watching a Simulcast Kdrama series called Yong Pal, it was very good and I had reached episode 16 before real life problems caused me to stop watching. The series is no longer available on Hulu even though the series is less than a year old.
I would recommend Hulu even with how much more expensive it is than other sites, though if you are short on cash good luck with those ads.