This weekend, Hulu and Roku are offering two months of free streaming to new customers. Where “new” generally means new email address. Given the imminent arrival of Showtime on Hulu (for an additional fee), I figured I’d strike while the iron is hot. However, the signup process was something of a turn off. Hulu, Roku, or maybe both require a gender and birth year to complete the registration process and surely feed their advertising initiatives. Obviously those can be spoofed if one so chooses, but I played along. However, where they lost me is Roku, versus Hulu, requiring a credit card on file.
Also can't sign up without letting Roku (vs Hulu) manage your credit card. No thanks. pic.twitter.com/fNoRrtpTkq
— Dave Zatz (@davezatz) June 27, 2015
I suppose it’s not much different than Apple hanging onto my info for iPhone app purchases, but I’m just not interested. In fact, I’ve gone out of my way to create Roku account without a credit card. So I passed. Look, between TiVo-ed shows, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO GO, I gots plenty of commercial-free content. Too much, in fact.
By the by, the promo graphic terminology is somewhat amusing. How exactly do you turn a Roku on (or off)? Also, squeezing two months into a two day weekend suggests amazing time-space continuum powers. :)
What? Youre Roku doesn’t have a power button floating ominously above it? Weird.
I have generally given up on my Roku, For me the only real advantage is the universal search but I usually know were things are streaming I want to watch. My primary consumption is Amazon, Netflix, HBO go and Showtime anytime. I use my Fire TV mostly followed by Apple TV for its apps you can’t get elsewhere IE Watch ABC. Hulu will never be a viable option for me as long as I have to watch that many commercials I can’t skip and pay for it.
“I suppose it’s not much different than Apple hanging onto my info for iPhone app purchases, but I’m just not interested. In fact, I’ve gone out of my way to create Roku account without a credit card.”
FWIW, you can also easily create an ITunes account sans credit card, as my household has long done. Refills via gift cards.
Amazon and TiVo get to keep my credit card on file, and that’s it.
——
Prior to the credit card news, I was initially going to take the offer solely to get the 3rd season of The Americans for free. Plus, Scientology’s ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to their newsletter
But it turns out that Hulu doesn’t have rights to The Americans, so I was gone even I learned about the credit card red-line here. Wonder how long it’ll take to get to Prime. Good show, but not quite good enough to be worth $35 a-la-carte to speed up the process…
—–
And off-topic, but Amazon Cloud Drive finally put up its fine-print TOS, and while there were some initially disturbing clauses to me, after a dialog with the Cloud Services team, it turns out it’s really as good as it originally looked, just as long as your not using it for commercial purposes. So I’m going to sign up. TiVo offloaded recordings stored in the cloud for cheap, along with a whole lot of other backups…
Once this offer is activated on the Roku, can the two months of free Hulu be viewed on other devices (e.g. TiVo) using the same Hulu log-in? Or is the trial somehow locked to that specific Roku? I would imagine it’s the former. I didn’t even realize that Roku handled billing for services other than M-Go (which is positioned as a default non-removable provider on my Roku).
Tim, I assume so… but can’t say for certain. Also, you should be able to remove M-Go from the top menu in the Settings. A very progressive move by Roku, I thank them for that.
Chucky, Americans Season 1 is still the best but we enjoyed 3 better than 2 even if it seemed like half a season. However, a lot of shows can’t seem to shake old characters and story arcs where they’d be better served just moving on (like OITNB). Good to know on Amazon – if nothing else, it’s a free, extra backup repository as long as one doesn’t have any privacy concerns.
Chucky, how do I offload my tivo recordings to Amazon Cloud Drive? Can I stream them back from the Tivo or do you need to downloading them? Do they show up in the Now Playing List? I was going to purchase a NAS but your idea sounds better.
“Good to know on Amazon – if nothing else, it’s a free, extra backup repository as long as one doesn’t have any privacy concerns.”
Well, not free. I’m talkin’ ’bout the $60/yr plan.
I have the extreme privacy concerns of a sane person who’s been following the news about both private industry and governments over the past few years. However, securely encrypting with my own long keys prior to backing up to any cloud service is how I’ve always handled such matters. With such OpSec, privacy concerns with Cloud Drive disappear.
I was previously employing the same OpSec with Amazon S3 for far more minimal backups. But Cloud Drive is much cheaper, and will allow me to back up much, much more to boot.
In fact, IMHO, if you’re using any cloud service without that type of OpSec, you should assume that your data will now or eventually be public in perpetuity. So if you want to avail yourself of the immense convenience of Dropbox, and the like, IMHO, you should assume that your data will be indexed, and eventually available to folks you haven’t authorized. And thus you should only upload data that you are fully comfortable ending up that way, which should then make you take a giant step back and think through the implications of what even seemingly harmless data like calendars, address books, photos, and the like, being out of your control really means…
—–
For anyone interested in the weeds, the concerning section of the Amazon TOS sez that Amazon reserves the right to suddenly terminate your account if your usage “substantially exceeds … normal use”. I took that to mean that ‘unlimited’ really means ‘more than 95% of our users’, and that you could be suddenly terminated without being able to download your data, which would make backup worse than useless.
However, in my dialog with the Cloud Services team, they assured me (in writing) that section only applied to “commercial use”, that ‘unlimited’ really means ‘unlimited’ as long as it doesn’t involve “commercial use”, and that any disagreements would initially result in a warning, rather than termination of my account without recourse to getting my data back.
“Chucky, how do I offload my tivo recordings to Amazon Cloud Drive? Can I stream them back from the Tivo or do you need to downloading them? Do they show up in the Now Playing List? I was going to purchase a NAS but your idea sounds better.”
Well, I’ve got a comment in Askimet purgatory about cloud OpSec that addresses some of this. But considering that Amazon includes vaguely worded copyright issues in the TOS, I’d strongly advise encrypting with your own keys prior to backup, meaning you’d have to download, rather than stream.
In short, this isn’t a replacement for a local storage repository, but a supplement for backup. (With the significant added bonus that you can archive things you don’t want to currently store on your NAS, but think there’s a chance you might want in the future.)
In case anyone’s wondering, yes, after activating this offer on Roku, you can use your free 2-month Hulu trial on other devices as well.
How do I activate two few months? All I see is one free week. I’ve never been a subscriber in the past.
Follow the three steps in the big green box at the top of this page. It *must* be done in the Hulu (or Hulu Plus) app on a Roku box. Offer expires end of day today. (Actually, before doing steps 2 and 3 above, make sure you have a valid credit card and email address registered with your Roku account.)
There’s always a catch it seems … thanks for posting on the downside of this offer!
Mary B , im looking at the comments, the free Hulu for 2 months is on Hulu plus, I seen it online while I was checking it out. Also through Roku you can get the pure flix movies, if you like Christian movies.
Well, it seems Amazon Cloud Drive is now legitimized by a trustworthy source: Arq is now offering an endpoint for backups to Cloud Drive.
Implied by the above, I’ve used and do trust Arq’s devs. It’s what I had been using for backups to S3. It lets you hold your own encryption keys, and simplifies backup from OS X and Windows. I trust the dev enough to make this a definitive endorsement of Cloud Drive for consumers, TiVo backups and all. (FWIW, I’ve chosen to roll my own encryption/backup scheme for Cloud Drive, since I prefer the simplicity and endurability of the web interface, my own encryption, and my own cataloging software. But for those who desire more simplicity, I heartily endorse Arq.)