All of these differences and business models are changing through constant deals with different studios, and I'm glad that deals happen at all. Otherwise, you get everyone trying to be like CBS and run their own paid streaming service. When the choice is to pay as much for CBS as we pay for access to all of the other networks… we skip CBS.
So it sounds like the deal that's probably going to happen between CW (which it seems is partially owned by CBS) and Hulu is going to end up status quo. Hulu seems to have wanted to pick up the full current seasons, and CW doesn't want that… but at least they can hopefully keep the recent 5? We heard this news, anyway, that the deal is ongoing and that there's some small chance that Hulu loses CW… and it got us thinking.
At this point, with the shows on the air, that we watch, that we have access to through our services… if Hulu lost CW, would there be a reason for us to keep it?
We watch some ABC shows, although Castle has ended, and I wonder if with the new Disney/NetFlix deal we could watch ABC shows on NetFlix sooner too (so Agents of SHIELD and… nope, they cancelled everything else). NBC lost us with most of their shows. No, we're realizing that most of the shows we are planning on still watching in the fall are all on CW: Arrow, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, iZombie, and Supergirl even is being moved over from CBS to CW.
We've slowly cut services from our life. Full cable. Basic cable. For a long period we had dropped NetFlix. But there's been some adds… Our town now has Red Box. We have Amazon Prime and just never think to look at it (the access always looks close to NetFlix when we do look, and it's not on the Apple TV so we don't look often since it doesn't seem worth it). And I'm sure, if we dropped Hulu, we'd be back at some future point. New deals, new shows.
So how about you? Have you had up and down relationships with the streaming services? What makes you leave – and what makes you stay? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
The answer may have to do with what happens with the ABC show(s) which might just be Agents of SHIELD. If it's available on NetFlix with their Disney/Marvel deal, then I think there's no reason for us at least for Hulu. Given that our original plan for dropping cable was basically, "yeah but we have Hulu and it has everything," it's still really weird to think of dropping it next.
we just today figured out that Hulu lost CW. Running the current episodes are what kept us keeping Hulu, and Netflix for the old stuff with occasional movie but I have noticed we watch less and less Netflix every day. We had prime but dropped that when most of the shows only allowed you to watch one season for free or they didn't have the shows we watched, not to mention the $100.00 annual fee. What are our options now? Has cable finally won?
I wonder about that. We're watching shows now on the ABC, NBC, CW, and FOX apps – shows we would have previously watched on Hulu. The networks are delaying – CW only a day, the rest a week – and then they're keeping the most recent 5, like on Hulu. And there's ads – so those networks are getting to make all of the ad revenue, rather than Hulu making that money and sharing it out. Oh man do we miss having one place to go for watching everything! But is that model being weakened, and maybe going away? I could see it. I feel like the streaming services saw it coming, and starting making their own shows. Value added!