I always considered myself a cable loyalist, but for my entire adult life, cable and I have had a love/hate relationship. That is, I love TV, and I hate cable companies. Yet I kept using cable, because I like watching live TV—in particular, local news. For a long time, that wasn’t an option through streaming services.
But when I went out of town for a few months this year to a house without cable, my temporary landlord suggested Hulu, the one service I had never subscribed to. After comparing prices, I signed up for the live package. It, at least, had the advantage of not being more expensive than cable. Six months later, I haven’t returned to cable, and my opinion on Hulu is completely altered—everything is on Hulu, and I rarely need to go elsewhere except for premium shows on other platforms.
How to access Hulu
While not dissimilar to other streamers, one of Hulu’s distinguishing features from cable is you can access it on almost any device—phone, laptop, smart tv, and major gaming consoles. Through the magic of casting like Chromecast, any of those devices can beam Hulu to your TV, so you can watch the service on the big screen.
While there are many, many streaming services, not all devices have native apps for them, but Hulu is one of the big ones, like Prime Video and Netflix, so the apps are everywhere. For what it’s worth, these work as a kind of redundancy. Occasionally the Hulu app on my TV gets a little wonky (all the apps do) and in those cases, I can open the app on my phone, throw it to the TV via Chromecast, and it works fine.
How much Hulu costs
Hulu understands that after cable companies, commercials are the second object of hatred bringing our nation together. The company’s tiers allow you to buy your way out of some, but not all, commercials. (That’s important, so we’ll talk about it a little more in a bit.) For $7.99 per month, or $79.99 a year, you get a login, access to their streaming library, and ads that, due to the platform, you can’t skip over. Hulu ads are painfully long, in my opinion, but traditional commercial breaks are also painfully long. You never realize how long two hours of Below Deck really is when you can’t blow past Bravo’s breaks (and you can’t, no matter how much you pay Hulu).
You can bump up to a “no ads” tier for $14.99 a month, but remember, it still really isn’t ad-free. Hulu still plays ads before and after shows and movies, and there are some channels that have unskippable ads, like Bravo (Andy Cohen, do something!).
From here, you can truly replace cable with the “with Live TV” tier. For $69.99 per month, you can add live channels, Disney +, and ESPN+, all with ads. To get all those channels without ads, you’ll need to pay $82.99 per month (and, in my opinion, that $13 make a huge difference.)
What’s Hulu’s Live TV like?
If you like live sports, local news, or watching shows as they air, having access to Hulu’s live option fulfills most of those needs while telling your cable company to kick rocks. However, if you’ve gotten used to the big-bucks user interface tested over 40 years from your cable company, Hulu’s experience leaves a little to be desired.
First, you can’t surf the guide and watch TV at the same time, which most cable and streaming services will allow you to do. Also, the guide is unintuitive. You’d expect to see your local channels first, followed by the bigger cable networks, and finally the niche and premium channels. Instead, they’re all thrown together in the guide. Further, you don’t see all channels by default, but rather only the most recent channels you’ve seen. To access all the channels ,you’ll need to move to a different view. There’s also a “Favorites” option in there, which is the only way I’ve figured out how to save my local channels in one place to surf them quickly.
As a DVR replacement, it’s mostly okay. You can choose shows to save once or over a season, and it will grab those shows from the earliest airing across all time zones. The downsides are the interface, which makes it quite annoying to get to the show you want to see, requires four of five key presses to delete a recording, and doesn’t let you arrange the shows. What’s more, Hulu clearly has an agreement with some channels not to record shows, but sub them with a streaming recording, which means you can’t skip over the commercials. ABC and Bravo are the ones that I run into this problem with the most.
Speaking of ABC, shortly after I signed up, ABC stopped having an agreement with Hulu, so you can’t watch it live. It does get all the shows later that night for watching back, but again, with commercials. (I am the single person propping up Grey’s Anatomy and I want to watch it live, damn it. If I have to watch it at 11 p.m., at least let me skip the commercials.)
Channels galore
Criticisms aside, a real selling point of Hulu is a lot of channels available to me now were only available on cable through premium tiers. Maybe access to Pop, Lifetime Movies, and Turner Movie Classics doesn’t matter to you, but channels like Vice, FXM and thirty variants of ESPN might.
How Hulu stacks up against traditional cable
Ultimately, the bad UX of the Hulu live guide has made me someone who watches live TV far less. I don’t really surf so much anymore, so I guess we become what we buy. Now, I’m a streamer. The upside is, I didn’t realize before how much content lives on Hulu, either natively or through a subnetwork agreement. In fact, having not used Hulu much at all for the last 10 years, I spend most of my time on Hulu now, and rarely need to go elsewhere.
A dealbreaker in the future might be a price bump, making it more expensive than my cable company, but right now it’s a dead heat. At some point the commercials might become so annoying I’d want to go back to a classic DVR. If Hulu lost another live channel, that might swing me. But for right now, if you move around, or just don’t want to get into it with a cable company, Hulu does make a convenient replacement.
