Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Hulu vs Netflix

A better title for this post would be "Hulu vs. Netflix vs. Illegal Chinese Streaming."  But to make it a fair fight, I'll just go with the "legal" internet TV and movie sites.

Netflix ranks as one of the top ten companies to fuck the goose that laid the golden egg.  They had the perfect business plan, basically putting Blockbuster and other movie rental stores out of business.  Little red DVD envelopes made up half of all non-junk mail and were set to save the US Postal Service.  But then...the suits that ran the company did what suits do and got drunk off of hookers and blow.  In their coked-out minds, thinking they were golden gods free to roam the Earth and bend mankind to their omnipotent will, they thought they could get away with secretly jacking up the price of their service and not telling anyone.  Then they started losing millions of dollars.

After a great amount of confusion and panic, hookers being tossed to the side and blow flying everywhere, the suits decided to send a ridiculous apology email saying that they were ever so sorry to have broken the trust of their customers...but they were still going to jack up the price.  Oh, and they were also going to take their outrageously successful business idea, DVD rental-by-mail, the core of "Netflix," and turn it into a separate business called "Quikster." Now you had to pay even more to get Netflix back in the form of streaming video.

After they lost another hundred million in stock prices, the suits had to apologize even more and begged customers to continue getting gouged for little in return.  Today Netflix streaming alone is $8 a month for an extremely limited selection of movies and shows.  Netflix's business plan now revolves around sucking in customers with cheap monthly streaming and secretly transitioning all their streaming stuff back to DVD so customers have to pay the full price of their increasingly-expensive service.  More cocaine, please.

Hulu was also a popular streaming site dedicated to TV and movies.  It was free, worked well and was well-liked.  It was too much of a good deal, so of course it had to be "monetized."  A monthly charge was threatened, leading to the loss of interest in 100% of all Hulu watchers.  A 3/5ths compromise of sorts was developed, so now you can have "free" streaming for an extremely limited selection of shows, or you can pay for "Hulu Plus" and get a fairly limited selection of shows added to the free stuff.

Free Hulu is inundated with commercials.  I was watching a free 20 minute show and literally after 2 minutes of the show's beginning there was a good 1 minute block of ads.  The ads are the same 2-5 ads repeated infinitely, so I hope you like Allstate and Citibank.

Netflix's more notable selection includes:

-Lots of bad anime
-Terrible CG movies being played on FX
-Crappy comedy shows
-Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
-The first season of a show you like that's in its 8th season

Hulu's selection includes:

-An insane amount of bad anime
-Chinese movies
-Good '70's shows that by today's standards are hilariously cheesy
-Oh here's a good show...oh wait Hulu tricked me into thinking it was free, here's a 90 second preview (Sandwiched by 1 solid minute blocks of ads)
-Seriously, a shit ton of anime



Fuck this, illegal Chinese streaming sites are the best.