I love Hulu's player and the site interface is great. Video quality is great. Ad length is tolerable, especially since you can just click around another site while it's playing. I watched all of Sunny In Philladelphia and Kitchen Confidential on it.

But then I want the watch The Soup and all you get is clips... I'm guessing this has to do with certain shows having contracts with other sites like Yahoo and/or restrictive broadcasting rights or something.

TV on the tube will always have a leg up on the web because all the shit on the web is usually a day late. It's for people that don't have DVR's and wouldn't be watching the shows if they had to be in front of the TV at specific times. Plus it's not much fun to have friends over to watch the newest episode of your favorite show on a computer the day after it originally aired.

The web will always have the advantage of convenience, variety, customization and probably gets viewed by billions of more people per day.

Hulu can only be as great as the content owners let it be. In the case of shows like The Office, I expect that rights owners don't want to cut into their DVD sales by giving the product away for free online. They give you some free samples and hope that entices into buying some DVD sets. It's really pretty reasonable, I think.

But hey, Hulu now has full seasons of The A-Team and The Fall Guy available for streaming right into your TV-less home, so it's not like they don't love you.

How do you get Adblock to work on Hulu?

While Hulu is frustrating at times, especially with its seemingly random full-episodes of certain series, your attitude about the advertising certainly won't encourage them to improve.

Remember why Hulu was created: to provide a legitimate alternative to YouTube. It was conceived as a kind of meet-me-halfway approach to online content. Consumers could get the shows they want how and when they want, and content providers could still make money.

The ads on Hulu aren't obtrusive, and are shorter than their over the air counterparts. By using ABP in this way you remove the motive for Hulu to improve, and if enough others follow, you remove its existance, however flawed.

I am sorry to have to do this, but this Machinist post is what it is: the absolute dumbest thing that I have read on Salon. Ever.

Mr. Farivar doesn't want to pay for cable? Mr. Farivar isn't willing to sit through a couple minutes of ads on Hulu?

And he thinks that he has a right to complain about the lack of timeliness in the shows he and his friends want to watch for free?

Get a clue.

These shows cost money to produce. If you don't like the revenue models, feel free to complain. If you don't think that the shows are worth the money -- or the couple of minutes to watch a handful of ads, fine.

But you can't complain that they aren't catering to you. You are not a client. You are not a customer. You and your friends are freeloaders. Nothing more than freeloaders. Perhaps leeches. Or parasites.

And you, personally, are an idiot. You think that Hulu would be awesome if all the shows were posted immediately for full -- and free -- viewing. That would not be awesome. That would be the death of The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Office, The Shield and all the other shows you and your friends love. Viacom and the others would not produce these shows if they could not make money on them. Jon Stewart, Colbert, Steve Carell, Michael Chiklis and the other stars would not appear in them. The writers would not produce scripts.

Of course, there is also the question of your own hypocrisy. You are being paid to produce content on a site that charges for much of its content. Where do you think that that money comes from? It comes from the ads (which you would bypass) & and the subscription fees (which you don't think are worth your money).

Let's be clear here. You objections are not that you have to pay too much money or watch too many ads. Your objection is simpy that you don't want pay any money or watch any ads.

Grow up. If you don't like the current models, feel free to offer one that works better. But don't simply whine that you can't get everything you want for free.

Unlike Mr. Ceolaf, I want everything free and I want it immediately. Apparently that's the way a lot of people want it because that's the way technology is headed.

Regarding Bittorrent, I can understand why downloading a daily show can be a hassle -- you have to wait for someone to upload the original torrent and the download won't be fast until several dozen people have already downloaded it and are seeding. But for everything else I find the combination of thepiratebay.org and utorrent (imagine the "u" is the greek letter mu) to be ideal. I just downloaded the first three episodes of Blake's 7 (500 MB) in about an hour. I've filled up 20 GB of hard drive in under 24 hours before. Hulu might be great, but Bittorrent completely rocks.

lol if you're not watching the ads you're infringing anyway

One of the earlier posters accused Mr. Farivar of hypocrisy because he is "... being paid to produce content on a site that charges for much of its content" using money from ads "which [Farivar] would bypass" and subscription fees "which [Farivar doesn't] think are worth [the] money". Salon's model is substantially different from cable subscriptions, though.

When you purchase cable TV you're getting the shows, but you're also paying for the privilege of seeing the advertisements that come along with them. If I signed up for cable, I would be paying large corporations to bombard me with deceitful, manipulative propaganda designed to brainwash me into compulsively buying crap I don't need. Stripping out the commercials from the content I paid for requires either that I purchase an expensive device like a Tivo, or that I have the time and technical skill to build a homebrew equivalent (still not cheap). Brilliant! No thanks.

By contrast, a Salon subscription fee makes the advertisements go away. That's completely worth it, right there.

I've experimented a bit with Hulu. If they offered a subscription service to make the advertisements go away, I might use them more. In the meantime, I'm going to take the money I would have spent on cable TV and buy DVDs instead. That way I get the shows I want, I can watch them on my own schedule, I get to keep them, and I don't have to put up with crappy advertising. Well, aside from trailers, which can be skipped with the "Root Menu" button. Oh, and if I buy a DVD or a box set and it turns out to be crappy, I can sell it at the local used-movies store to recoup some of my cash.