Aviously

After I finished my testing of YouTube TV, I went ahead and tried out Hulu Live, and while it may give YouTube a run for their money, they both still have a long way to go.

• Live TV plays smoothly, no issues starting up or finding the Network you’d like. Although it would be nice if there was a “TV Guide” style list of all the shows currently on, as the current look can be a little clunky.
• On that note, it makes it hard to find upcoming recordings, which often leaves you wondering if you are going to have the shows that night.
• The recordings are very tight on time. If your show is from 8-8:30, you are going to get a recording of 29 minutes, 59 seconds. That’s not okay. It means that if their servers are off by a few seconds (which they are), or the show runs over by a few seconds, you are going to miss parts.
  • Speaking of which: Sporting events need to have an extra half hour tacked onto the end of them. Sometimes (okay, most times), the games run over, and having just a little bit of pad room would be nice.
• When loading up DVR recordings, the app will sometimes just load infinitely, with the time on the bar showing a negative number of about 50,000 minutes…
• Choosing what you are recording is a real hassle, especially when it comes to sports.
  • My example was trying to record all the NYCFC matches. Hulu let me put “teams” on my list, but it wouldn’t record the games. And if I choose “MLS”, it would record all MLS games and not just City.
    So in order to do it properly, I would have to go find the game, and click “Add to episodes”. But I wouldn’t be able to find it unless I went to the channel airing the game, and scrolling through the timeline until the time it was going to air, which isn’t doable until the day before the match.
• I paid for the version of Hulu with “No ads”, which meant when watching regular Hulu programming, most shows would be ad-free.
  But when watching the recorded shows, the ads are still there…which is completely understandable and expected.
  However, instead of the commercial breaks being part of the “recording”, they show up as added breaks, like regular ads on Hulu which you can’t skip through, forcing you to watch ads on recordings.
• The Channel list is really good, equaling YouTube toe-to-toe, despite each one missing a handful of channels, in this case AMC.

After experimenting with YouTube TV and Hulu Live, I have decided to go back to no cable-cutting TV streaming…for now.

For more info on the add-ons, pricing, and other features of Hulu Live check out my other post.