I have to laugh at myself sometimes. I used to think my mom was silly for complaining about how many commercials were shown during a typical tv show. She used to make us watch PBS all the time because there were no commercials. During their peak “giving” seasons, she would take the time that PBS celebs would take to beg for donations to keep the programming alive to clean up the house, go to the bathroom, make something to eat – whatever. That was 30 years ago. Since I have some Alfred Hitchcock in my Hulu queue, I can honestly say that a 30-minute program in 1957 had an average of 5 minutes worth of commercials. Today, there are closer to 9 minutes worth of commercials. Imagine what she could have done with all that time! An average 60-minute long show has about 17 minutes worth of commercials.

Because I spend so much time at my computer, Hulu has become somewhat of a lifesaver when it comes to having background noise. My “office” doesn’t currently have cable setup in it, which is kinda just as well because I don’t have another tv to plug in anyway. But there are many tv shows that I wind up missing because I’m hip-deep in a project that I’m working on and just don’t want to tear myself away from it. Kinda makes me feel like a slacker. But Hulu fixes that for me! I can create my own personal queue with a list of all the shows I want to see. As I mentioned earlier, I even have Alfred Hitchcock presents in my list! At one point I had over 180 items in my queue. I went through one day and weeded many of them out and watched quite a few of the others. I’m down to about 50 now. In that list I have Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Chicago Hope, Fringe, V, and Flash Forward. My roommate and I still have tv nights during most of the week – particularly Wednesday and Thursday nights when Glee and Vampire Diaries are on.

Hulu serves as a great backup to my cable’s DVR. While the DVR costs approximately $15/mo (and between my roommate and I we have 3 tv’s!), Hulu doesn’t cost anything. Although, I did hear a rumor in the past month or so that Hulu may go to a subscription service, which would kinda suck. But, depending on what kind of rate they charge, it still might be worth it.

The other thing that’s fun is I actually have a dual monitor setup. I work on my 22″ monitor and keep all of my video and Hulu on a 15″ monitor. The only problem with watching new episodes of my favorite shows is that sometimes I find myself watching the video instead of doing my work. Not that often though. I really do have it more for background noise than anything else.

Today, I’m catching up on Fringe (Fox, Thursday nights at 10pm). I was quite pleasantly surprised that I became interested in this show to begin with. It’s a cross between X-Files and House. A friend of mine had it playing while I was at his house one day and I was almost instantly hooked. I have it record on my DVR in my bedroom now and when I find that I just don’t want to watch tv in there, I queue it up on Hulu and I’m happier than a pig in slop. Same for V (ABC, Tuesday nights at 8pm). I continue to be a total Bravoholic, and almost never miss any of my favorites there. My roommate and I sit and watch all the Real Housewives, Tabatha’s Salon Takeover, Flipping Out, Top Chef…so many that I can’t think of them all. Real Housewives is probably our favorite.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that Hulu does still have commercials. The image of the “Fringe Progress Meter” shows white dots – that is where Hulu has placed commercials for this particular episode of Fringe. These spots run from 10 to 30 seconds and most times I don’t even noticed that they happened. Hulu will also offer another commercial image with some shows where you can opt to watch a longer commercial before the episode begins. Then, there are no commercials during the rest of the episode.

Needless to say, I’m a HUGE fan of Hulu and while I hope they don’t switch to a subscription basis, keeping a minute+ long commercial at the beginning of an episode for an ad-free episode would be well worth the fee!

I should also mention that some of the networks (ABC, CBS, CW, FOX, NBC), also offer free full episodes on their websites as well. As a matter of fact, I had a 10-day marathon watching 4 seasons of Lost on ABC. Fancast.com has been advertising on regular tv lately and I checked it out last night. Their service is not as easy for me because when their commercial break is over, the user has to click on the “continue” button. I can’t be bothered to stop what I’m doing every time an ad finishes running. Like I said, I do the whole video thing for background noise – it is not at all my primary focus. When I first started playing with online tv, I was using only the one monitor and had my primary windows sized in such a way that I could have a small window to display the videos. Even then, when the video was right there for me to watch, my eyes were on the windows where I had my work going on. If I really wanted to sit and watch tv, I could go sit in the livingroom.

So advertisers can continue to spend umteen millions of dollars on tv commercials. This is finally something I can agree with my mom about – I’m not going to waste my time on commercials on live tv when I can either watch Hulu, or record shows on my DVR and fast-forward through all the ads.