Hulu & Hulu Live Review! Cord Cutting for Sport Fans...
- Oct 21, 2017
- 3 min read
I thought our family would have been the last people on earth to cancel cable. My husband and I are both big sports fans and although I didn’t have cable before we were married, I’ve grown attached to having it.
Coming into prime TV season, with our favorite shows returning and start of abundant sports, our budget got a bit tighter. We had to take a hard look at how we spend our money.
With a bill of over $200 for Cable and Internet, we made the decision to cut the cord and drop traditional cable. We kept internet through our local cable provider for about $75 a month, but we cut over $125 off our cable bill!!
We weren’t ready to completely cut out TV so we added Hulu. Initially, I set us up for the $11.99 Hulu Plan. This is their basic package, but I splurged the extra $4 to cut out commercials.
Hulu Base Plan Pros and Cons ($7.99 - $11.99):
PROS
It is cheap!!! You get a ton of content for less than cable and less than many other streaming plans.
Great customer service – I had a quick question about setting up Hulu through our Smart TV vs. xbox. Customer Service answered quickly and was super helpful.
No buffering or slowdowns – We stream through our xbox and haven’t any interruptions.
New shows are available the day after they air. This gives you access to new content with only a short delay.
Hulu Originals – This is one aspect I haven’t explored a ton, but The Handmade’s Tail has gotten great reviews.
Steaming through the Hulu App – We can watch Hulu anywhere through the App which increases flexibility.
CONS
Sports – This is probably the only thing that watching in real time is important to me, so not having live access to channels like ESPN or Fox Sports was a bit of a draw back.
We were still missing a few channels on this plan. For example, we didn’t get USA programs for some reason.
Once College Football Season started we decided to up our plan to Hulu Live to increase our access to sports. This bumped the cost up about $30 a month, but we got quite a bit in return.
Hulu Live Review ($39.99)
PROS (in additional to all the pros above)…
It’s still way cheaper than cable!! At $39.99 per month it definitely offset some of our savings, but with a $125 reduction in our cable bill we are still super happy with the overall impact on our budget.
TONS of Content!! We got access to some of the channels we’d been missing such as USA. This plan also includes HBO which we’d never had before.
DVR Capabilities – With the Hulu Live Plan we can now record shows live and pause/rewind programs. This lets us watch our shows the day they are released and record as well.
Most importantly… SPORTS!!! We get all the sport channels we did with cable and more.
Overall, I think we are now a streaming family for life. I don’t think we’ll ever go back to traditional cable even if our budget expands. The value we get through Hulu or Hulu Live for the price works great for us! We aren’t missing anything except the big bill. I do think we may drop back down to Hulu’s Base Plan after Football Season is over, but that flexibility is really another plus of streaming.
If you want to take Hulu for a test spin, use the link below to get 30 days free. It’s easy to set up and cancel in case it doesn’t work out for you….
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