Good - I hope that means they will stay around and continue to grow. I certainly don't mind paying a modest monthly fee for quality programming on demand. It couldn't be near as much as DirecTV was charging me before I switched to Hulu.
Good question and I asked myself the same when I wrote my original response. It's difficult to get a truthful answer of what someone would pay unless they are actually paying but I'll try.
My DirecTV was ~$75/month with taxes which cost me around $2/hour based on 1hr a day. I switched to Hulu because my costs went from $75 to $0. I'd probably be willing to pay up to $30/month commercial free or $15/month with commercials.
I do wonder if Hulu will seriously be able to compete with cable when Comcast is on the board.
Hulu's CEO spoke at my school about a week ago. From what I understood, they will charge for shows like Entourage which he said could never be offered free.
i'd pay for a live version of hulu with all of the archives available.
i canceled my directv subscription a while back and just download the few shows i care about that come through torrent rss feeds. if i could watch them live via something like hulu, but then also access them whenever i wanted after that point, i'd be a customer.
I too canceled DirecTV in favor of Hulu, but I prefer to not torrent the content and instead opt to watch it legally via Hulu or buy it from iTunes. If the show is not on either of those sources, then I just don't watch it. (Or likely even know it exists.)
The upside of this is that I watch far less TV because it has a real and immediate cost (especially if it's not on Hulu). The downside is that the endless buffering and stuttering I get on Hulu drives me crazy. I know that my ISP may be partly to blame, but that makes Hulu a lot less valuable to me than the downloadable iTunes option. There's been more than one evening were Hulu simply refused to work reliably and I ended up purchasing the commercial-free episodes on iTunes instead. Ironically, the iTunes downloads were so fast that I could watch the shows immediately as if they were streaming with the added bonus of actually owning the episode so I could watch it again later - perhaps long after Hulu removed it.
I'd pay $9.99 per month. No more. After that, I just wouldn't bother. I'd pay $9.99 a month right now if I could have it without commercials or even more shows, preferably older content like Seinfeld, Friends, and other lazy afternoon junk.
If I could pay a reasonable amount for perpetual access to commercial-free content, I'd be happy with that. As it stands, I tend to buy the shows I want once they're on DVD, which works out to ~$2 per show. I wouldn't object to paying a bit more than that to get them in a non-encumbered format soon after the shows air. I'm sure I'm not alone in that I won't be paying for content that forces me to watch commercials, or that revokes my viewing abilities when I stop paying, though.
Wow, maybe I'm just getting old and cantankerous, but the word freetard is seeming more and more apropos every day.
I've pretty much abandoned Hulu as Netflix's streaming library grows. $14/month or whatever is a tiny amount to pay for that amount and quality of on-demand commercial-free content.
I use Netflix a lot more than Hulu lately, but only because I can't play Hulu on the XBOX, and I hate having a computer running Windows just for TV (full screen Hulu HD is choppy and slow on Linux). Hulu is dramatically better for current shows, since Netflix streaming doesn't usually get them until the whole season is on DVD.
The crunchyroll model is nice - free with horribly annoying ads and a week delay on new releases, or pay a monthly fee for increased res, no ads, and same-day viewing of things aired on TV.
Bit off topic, but most libraries have an interlibrary loan system that can get you pretty much any book you might need, for free. Sorry, but not using the library is the definition of ignorance.
