One of the biggest complaints I hear about Hulu Plus is that there are still commercials despite paying for it. I'm not sure why people think it should be commercial free when Cable costs money and still has commercials; however, being a data oriented kinda guy I wanted to try and compare the impact of commercials in these two mediums and perhaps try to determine if the benefit was really worth it.
To do this I basically kept a spreadsheet for each show I watched, tracked how long each show and commercial break was then did the numbers.
The results are basically that on Hulu you spend 5.6% of your viewing time watching commercials. Compare that to cable tv where you spend 28% of your time watching commercials and to me at the least Hulu offers a large value at only $9/mo compared to cable's $60+/mo. Now consider you get all that for free really, and that the $9/mo for Plus is for additional benefits, like "streaming" to non computer devices, HD and back episodes for a lot of shows.
An argument for cable is that with a DVR you can skip all the commercials, reducing them to a few seconds. Towards this I'd say that cable would prefer you didn't and would likely stop you if they could, where Hulu's default offering is pretty good. Also the commercials do pay for the content your viewing on cable so it's arguable if you're doing your show any good by skipping commercials, but that's a discussion for another time.
Perhaps the only other stat that comes out of this data is that he average commercial length on Hulu is 24s, not too bad really.
(Note: This data is from earlier in 2011, I just didn't get around to writing about it. I also wasn't incredibly stringent on the exact number of seconds in each break since they are off a little from each other, and you can argue whether those couple second PSA's are ads, but for comparison purposes I think the error amounts aren't significant.)
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