I use Hulu on occasion and don't mind the commercials. All this "keep the internet" nonsense is crap. The idealists spout these slogans...as they shell out $60 a month for broadband. You have to have ads, especially on the internet. At least with cable, some of your monthly bill actually goes to the content providers via the fees they charge to the cable company to carry their networks. With the net, the guys that own the wires keep it all, and Hulu can suck it.
Well...now you get at the heart of this whole net neutrality debate, right? The broadband service provider that you pay each month sees services like Hulu as leaches. Your broadband provider's position is that they've invested a bunch of money in infrastructure. Now a bandwidth intensive service like Hulu (or whatever) comes along and, with very little investment, sends their content over your ISP's pipes with the intent of profiting therefrom. Your ISP will tell you that the bandwidth intensive service should pay some sort of "toll" to move that data through their pipes. The third party service, of course, will say that we are already paying for that in our monthly check to the ISP.
If you are a ISP, your biggest fear is to become a dumb pipe.
For a service like Hulu, I could see them becoming sort of a hybrid sort of thing. Maybe you'll get some sort of limited free content, but need to subscribe ($$$) to get more current stuff. The problem is that if all of the things you want to watch are not on the same platform, how many services will you need to subscribe to in order to watch what you want? Hulu has done an OK job trying to aggregate a bunch of stuff, but there is a lot of stuff you have to go elsewhere for. How much are people willing to pay for stuff that's already free, or being "paid for" by a cable subscription?
I guess the day will soon come where it all converges, right?
