First, Hulu is, IMHO, great. It isn't the one-service-to-rule-them-all, but for $8/month I get the same basic shows I would otherwise be paying many time for on basic cable, generally available day after airing (it's been a long time since I've cared to look, but the couple of current shows I watch seem to be next-day availability).
The whole 8-day delay thing that Fox pioneered has always been just stupid, as Nagromme I believe pointed out above. You can never catch up to the show until the end of the season, which means a cable subscriber can't use Hulu to catch up and then get on the more profitable live-broadcast-watching train. Doesn't matter to me, as I'm not a cable subscriber (going on 8 years this fall), so if a particular show is time-delayed, I just watch it when it becomes available as though that was when it was released.
The main thing to remember about Hulu, though, is that its
non-free-tier content is limited in simultaneous streams. That is, if you are watching something that is available free tier on a computer and someone else watches a subscription-tier show on the AppleTV, you both can watch at the same time. But if they are still watching that subscription-tier show on the AppleTV and you try switching to a non-free-tier show (often the back catalogue of previous seasons for shows is not in the free tier, counter-intuitively), you will get a black screen telling you someone else is already streaming. This includes Showtime subscriptions (which is why you should
never subscribe to Showtime through Hulu since you can get three simultaneous streams which don't block your "normal" Hulu streams for the exact same price, but that's a different story).
Netflix allows you to pay more for more simultaneous streams. Amazon has enough simultaneous streams that our family never runs into the limitation. But with Hulu you have no way to throw more money at them for it to work in a family setting with multiple devices (technically, you could get a different account and subscription for each device, but then you pay a lot more and end up losing a lot of the features of Hulu in the bargain).
Hulu: you would get more money from me if I could pay more for more simultaneous streams! As it is, you are losing money because I am not adding more content into that "one stream at a time" bucket.
Still, our (family of 8) general content-watching sources are:
- Hulu subscription (nee "Hulu Plus") for most "filler content" stuff. Yeah, we get ads, but for filler content we don't really care. Not worth $4/month to get rid of ads here for us.
- Amazon Prime for some other stuff if we think of looking there, but that is only rarely because the FireTV Stick is a pain to work with and Amazon refuses to put their Prime Video on our Apple TV.
- iTunes for any shows we really enjoy and want to watch hassle-free in high quality
- iTunes for any movies (rent, or buy if the price is really low)
- HBO subscription for a few months a year to catch up on HBO shows
- Netflix subscription for a few months a year to catch up on Netflix shows
- Visit bars/restaurants/friends for sports
- Internet for news
Between all of the above, even on our "worst" months we spend about a third of what we had been spending on cable in 2008 when we canceled, and about a fifth of what that same bundle would cost us if we switched back to cable today.
