88% Of What You Pay For In Hulu Plus Is Available On Hulu… For Free

Here’s an unpleasent surprise for customers of Hulu Plus: over 88% of all full-length TV program episodes available in their $10/month service are already available for free on Hulu.com.  Oh, and when it comes to clips that percentage jumps up to 98%. Oh, and you still get commercials.

Over at Video Nuze they are reporting on a study done by research firm One Touch Intelligence that points out that of the twenty-eight thousand plus television episodes on Hulu Plus, less then eighteen percent couldn’t be seen for absolutely free on Hulu.com.

One thing that Video Nuze does point out is that the subscription service is less then two months old but still it doesn’t make up for the fact that not only are people paying for the service but on top of that they STILL have to sit through commercials.

Yeah, every review of the service you can find points out that even though you are paying there are still commercial breaks.

Huh?  You get to pay, you get to sit through commercials and then you find out that most of what is available to you could be seen for free with commercials.

Then there is the question of incrimental episodes of the series available on the service.  For the most part it’s a pretty poor collection especially when compared the major competitor of Hulu Plus: Netflix.

Hulu has some deep pockets but the issues that face them today are mostly trying to get the networks and content owners to free up the content to them in a timely manner and hopefully working out some exclusive deals to try and combat Netflix and the up and coming new version of Apple’s AppleTV (whatever it might be called).

Netflix has the jump on them and it doesn’t look like they are going to slow down and the bottom line difference is that when you pay for Netflix you don’t get commercials.

Can Hulu Plus come out ahead? Do you use the service or Netflix? Let me know in the comments section!