cinefan
Stunt Coordinator
- Joined
- Sep 10, 2007
- Messages
- 111
- Real Name
- Stephen
YouTubeTV recently failed to reach a carriage agreement with SNY (the cable network that carries most of the New York Mets games). SNY disappeared from YouTubeTV on July 1. So, I dropped YouTubeTV. One of the main reasons I had it was to watch the Mets (alas, we are diehard Mets fans at our house without respect to their current performance -- weep for us). I switched to Hulu (With Ads) + Live TV in order to pick up SNY -- it also had most of the other stuff we watched on YouTubeTV and was a bit cheaper as a bonus.
My normal mode of watching a game is to DVR it with the streaming service's cloud-based DVR and start watching perhaps 20 minutes after the broadcast begins so that I can fast-forward most of the ads and, generally, catch up to live TV by the end of the broadcast. It worked great with YouTubeTV (and with my previous cable-based DVR for that matter). I quickly discovered that on Hulu I was repeatedly forced to watch 60 to 90 seconds of their non-skippable ads (not the ads included in the broadcast) after fast forwarding through 2 or 3 broadcast commercial breaks. Very annoying (especially when coupled with other elements of their DVR interface which I find generally inferior to YouTubeTV's -- but that's a matter for a different post).
I concluded this must be because I was only paying for "Hulu (With Ads) + Live TV", not "Hulu (No Ads) + Live TV". So I upgraded. To my surprise: no difference (with respect to this specific behavior). I still am subjected to periodic forced ads trying to fast-forward through the games. I've seen this for games carried both on SNY and on ESPN.
I have not seen this behavior on other things I'm recording; for example episodes of Jeopardy and some hour long programs on one of their Vevo music networks. I can seemingly fast forward that DVRed content all I want without forced ads; this was true both before and after I upgraded to "No Ads". I *think* the difference is I generally watch these other programs after they have finished recording; not while they are still in-progress recordings like the games. I haven't had it long enough to do lots of experimenting to see if this is consistently true.
Hulu does put some weasel-words around their "no ads" claim saying that certain shows may still have ads at the beginning and end -- but I can't find anything that talks about possible forced ads while watching a DVR recording.
Before I try to deal with their customer service: does anyone else have this service and have you experienced this behavior with recordings? If so have you found any workarounds?
My normal mode of watching a game is to DVR it with the streaming service's cloud-based DVR and start watching perhaps 20 minutes after the broadcast begins so that I can fast-forward most of the ads and, generally, catch up to live TV by the end of the broadcast. It worked great with YouTubeTV (and with my previous cable-based DVR for that matter). I quickly discovered that on Hulu I was repeatedly forced to watch 60 to 90 seconds of their non-skippable ads (not the ads included in the broadcast) after fast forwarding through 2 or 3 broadcast commercial breaks. Very annoying (especially when coupled with other elements of their DVR interface which I find generally inferior to YouTubeTV's -- but that's a matter for a different post).
I concluded this must be because I was only paying for "Hulu (With Ads) + Live TV", not "Hulu (No Ads) + Live TV". So I upgraded. To my surprise: no difference (with respect to this specific behavior). I still am subjected to periodic forced ads trying to fast-forward through the games. I've seen this for games carried both on SNY and on ESPN.
I have not seen this behavior on other things I'm recording; for example episodes of Jeopardy and some hour long programs on one of their Vevo music networks. I can seemingly fast forward that DVRed content all I want without forced ads; this was true both before and after I upgraded to "No Ads". I *think* the difference is I generally watch these other programs after they have finished recording; not while they are still in-progress recordings like the games. I haven't had it long enough to do lots of experimenting to see if this is consistently true.
Hulu does put some weasel-words around their "no ads" claim saying that certain shows may still have ads at the beginning and end -- but I can't find anything that talks about possible forced ads while watching a DVR recording.
Before I try to deal with their customer service: does anyone else have this service and have you experienced this behavior with recordings? If so have you found any workarounds?
