Appatic

Starting February 1st of 2014, The venerable and well designed Hulu Desktop App will stop being supported. Which means that passing that day it will only work until a future Hulu Backend Update breaks it. Whether that happens in one week, one month or one year from now is unknown.

This news is something that comes to you now every time you launch the desktop app.

A real shame to see Hulu Desktop to go away as I still think it is the easiest way to quickly browse into the Hulu Catalog and manage your subscriptions and queue. But the writing on the wall for its soon demise started many months ago when the option to download it vanished and was clear to me when I noticed they were pushing to discourage its use by changing the Ad Ratio in the Ad breaks around 3 months ago. As it suddenly went from 2-3 ads to 5 ads. Yes, even if you have Hulu Plus. Something that only happened and will still only happen in Hulu Desktop for those using it to the very end.  Which arguably will only be those still with Old PC’s on Windows XP and Windows Vista or those that used it bridged-in with Windows Media Center. 

If it was your case you may already know this. If you use Hulu but never even knew Hulu Desktop existed, well now you know. Just in time to wave it away.

For those also wondering why Hulu just don’t keeps supporting it if they have being showing more ads on it. Arguably making more money of it. The reason is that it don’t allows for the Interactive Ad Experience and their Smarter Ad Tracking.  Stuff they can do on the Website or partly compensate for in their Hulu Plus apps for Windows Phone, Windows Metro, Xbox and elsewhere. They could update it to allow for that, But I guess that would not promote Hulu Plus enough. I think that is understandable. I just wish the Windows Metro App for Hulu Plus would offer better ways to add stuff to your queue, manage your subscriptions, browse the catalog and handle stream quality settings. Maybe now that they are leaving Hulu Desktop out in the woods to die they will get to do that. Lets hope.

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