Hulu: Stream TV shows & movies

Catching up on last night’s episode, on the train

A programme goes out on a network in the evening and by the morning commute it’s waiting on your phone. That is Hulu’s pitch to American viewers, and it’s a narrow, specific one: current-season broadcast television the day after it airs, sitting in the same app as an on-demand back catalogue and, on the right plan, live channels. The app is built around following shows week by week rather than swallowing a series in a weekend, and the people who keep paying for it are the ones who still watch television on television’s schedule.

Playback is dependable on a decent connection and the picture holds up on a phone screen. The guide for live channels is laid out much like the one it was designed to replace, which is a compliment rather than a criticism, and moving between a recorded series and a channel that’s on right now doesn’t mean leaving one part of the app for another. Profiles keep a household’s viewing histories apart, and picking up a half-watched episode on a different screen lands you where you stopped instead of somewhere near it. Catalogue organisation is reasonable, though redesigns arrive often enough to unlearn whatever your thumb had memorised.

When the advert break falls over

The ad-supported tier is where this loses its marks, and the failure is more irritating than a missing feature would be. An episode reaches its break, the advert stalls, the progress bar sits still, and you’re left staring at a frozen frame deciding whether to back out and lose your place or wait and hope it recovers. Sometimes the break simply never ends. Whatever tension the programme had built goes with it, and the recovery, backing out to the home screen and finding the episode again, takes longer than the break should have. Regular viewers on the cheaper plan end up with a routine for it.

Offline downloads are the other soft spot, behaving less predictably here than on the iPhone version, so anyone relying on them before a flight should check what actually landed rather than assume. The live guide slows noticeably on older hardware, and raising a billing question from inside the app is harder than it should be.

What the subscription actually buys

Next-day access to current network shows, and across America there isn’t a real substitute for it. If you follow programmes as they air, and particularly if you follow several across different networks, this is the one service that keeps you level with the conversation at work the following morning. The rest of the market is built for catching up later, a different habit entirely.

If you’re happy waiting a year and swallowing a series in a weekend, the case here is much thinner. The ad tier’s stumbles will cost you more patience than the catalogue repays, and the Android download behaviour will let you down on the one journey you planned around it. The content earns the subscription. The plumbing around it is what keeps the verdict modest.