How to advertise at me: Buy Podcasts and Hulu. And giant billboards, huge ones!

If you want to send an ad message my way, if you need my ass to get up off whatever it's on and to a store or a show or a website ... you gotta buy podcasts and Hulu. And of course giant billboards. Who, after all, can resist giant letters telling you to do stuff? (see above)

See?

Of course when I'm indoors billboards don't work. But don't advertise on a network or cable show and expect me to sit through the ads, especially since the days of Chuck Woolery's "we'll be back in 2 and 2" are long gone. Ad breaks can be almost 5 minutes sometimes.

In fact, there was a TV Guide Network show called Stand Up in Stilettos and I found that if you hit the right key on the cable remote to advance the recording five minutes you could actually jump from the end of the last comedian's segment directly to host Kate Flannery introducing the next one. Five full minutes.

I don't watch anything live. With about nine minutes of ads in a half hour show it seems foolish.

The ads I do hear and see sponsor podcasts and shows on Hulu. Even Hulu Plus has advertising. You can't fast forward through the ads for your $7.99 a month, that just gives you the power to push the stuff to your big TV (via Roku, your smart TV, Google Chromecast, etc.).

I wonder what it would cost without advertising. Anyone?  Just an estimate is all I need.

Most of the shows I watch on Hulu have only four ad breaks a minute or shorter. VERY doable. Not frustrating at all.

Sometimes if I HAVE to watch a broadcast or cable show live as it airs I actually forget what was going on in the program because it was SO LONG AGO. 

(Yeah, I'm getting older too.)

The other place you can advertise at me is on my favorite podcasts. Sure, you can fast forward through those ads too, but usually they're read by the show's host and they're so integrated with the program that you ... uh, you just don't.

In fact, some of my favorite WTFpod moments have been when Marc Maron does the big sell for AdamAndEve.com. Very very entertaining. His tone is perfect. Check one here, click this link and then go to 12:35 on his recent Ben Sidran episode. Perfectly executed.

My Hulu membership in fact started from a podcast ad, from Comedy Bang Bang.

Of course I'll always have love for giant billboards. I don't need them to dance or light up or tell me the time and weather. Just be clever and have great visuals.

If you're trying to reach me otherwise, however, you're gonna have to knock on my front door. And, uh ... don't knock on my front door.

DON'T!

FREE 2-MONTH HULU TRIAL? The Hulu blog should be more active, should tell you the deals.

The last post on the Hulu blog was on August 5. They need to hire someone to work that blog. No links on any of the show pages, no referring links anywhere else on the site, you actually need to know the URL to find it (which btw is http://blog.hulu.com/).

I'd like to know what's upcoming from them, not the individual episodes that get added but the shows they're planning on bringing in.

If you click around the web you find so much more Hulu info, like this post at CNET (see image above) that offers you a 2-month free trial!!! My trial (in day 5 currently) was only 2 weeks through the Comedy Bang Bang website.Get yourself a better deal, even if you don't wanna watch their original series The Awesomes.

Speaking of which ... The Awesomes isn't bad, it has a fine pedigree coming from Mike Shoemaker & Seth Meyers who bring a bunch of their SNL pals along as character voices. The problem with it I think is it's a cartoon developed by comedy people (with an assist from cartoonist Judd Winick, former Real World participant. Even Winick isn't really the right kind of creative to handle this job in my opinion. Should have grabbed some former TV toon people who really know how to exploit the medium. 

I checked out the four episodes that are up on the site last night. It's a sitcom that's been animated. It should be a cartoon. There's a difference. The only time they did sufficiently exploit the medium was during a scene where they're auditioning new "heroes" to be part of the team. Guy with the rhino head cracked me up.

Otherwise, meh.

Cut The Cord: I am fully, completely entertained by Netflix & Hulu on Roku

I am. Absolutely, full, completely entertained by a combination of Netflix Instant and Hulu on my Roku 2 device. It's been a perfect viewing experience. I had only one issue with the actual streaming on only on one Hulu video (from the 2010 Just For Laughs festival). Otherwise the picture is pristine on my 40" LCD, the useability of the Roku device is solid, and with adding on over-the-air broadcast stations I'd be set. No cable TV necessary.

Last night I watched a couple episodes of The IT Crowd on Netflix, The Speech, which features my favorite thing in all sitcomdom, the Moss and Roy plot that I affectionately call "Jen, this is the Internet" and Friendface, the episode that ends with Moss and Roy fighting to be Jen's fake boyfriend in front of all her old college chums. EVERY episode of this international Emmy and BAFTA winning sitcom that manages to squeeze so much funny out of only four regular characters and does it better than almost any other sitcom in history.

After that the final two episodes of Moone Boy on Hulu (also Chris O'Dowd, who's in The IT Crowd and also the recent HBO series Family Tree). Moone Boy's a show he created about a young boy kinda like him growing up in Boyle in Ireland who happens to have an adult imaginary friend (played by him). Delightful! Wonderful! Very sweet, funny, tale of Liam Moone, a moon faced boy living in the 80s in an Irish town with all the usual hurdles and hardships of being a kid ... with an encouraging someone on his shoulder.

Lovely show.

And great for your not-too-young kids, too.

And Steve Coogan shows up in an incredible guest starring role in the second episode. Don't miss that. His scenes with Liam's mom, played by the beautiful Dierdre O'Kane are hilarious.

NOTE: There are commercials on Hulu. You can't skip them. However, they are short breaks (maybe 40 seconds, tops), not the overlong breaks that broadcast and cable TV needs to keep the lights on. It's doable. These are the first TV ads I've watched in a long time, because I record EVERYTHING, even if I watch the same day. Or in the cast of last night's Jeselnik Offensive on Comedy Central, I started watching 11 minutes after it started so I could FF through the commercials.

Cutting the cord and negotiating cable event series

Broadchurch leads Olivia Colman and David Tennant

Quickly, because it's not the point of this post, let me just say Broadchurch episode one was solid, brilliantly acted (especially Olivia Colman) and sets up some great stuff for the remaining 7 stanzas on BBC America. I'd really like to know what was on that kid's computer that he deleted. And one more thing ... do you think American TV execs would ever choose two people who look like this to star in a series? This is why I love British TV, it's not about how hot you are but how hot your acting is, and these two have it in spades.

I love British TV so much in fact that the real hurt for me in cutting the cord will be BBC America and the other cable channels from IFC to Encore/Starz that license that content. This will require a shift in thinking.

I could buy Broadchurch on iTunes, of course. $20.99 for the eight episodes, making for a per episode cost of $2.62. For 42 minutes of content. A discount of 37 cents for buying the season pass. BTW, they're giving you the first one free if you want, just click here for that (limited time). And then of course I own the thing. Forever. Not that rewatching a crime drama is really a thing, you do already know who did it.

I could acquire one of those UK expatriate browser add-ons that I see advertised and watch it on ITV's catch up service, they're rent it to you for 1.29 UK, two bucks American. I'm not gonna try it, though. Not yet.

Of course, you could always torrent the sucker, but that's really a last resort that I wouldn't use unless, for example, you're Olivia Colman's American cousin and you can justify it with some higher calling to family pride or whatever. Pirating is illegal.

There is something else you can do, though, and it's FREE! It's difficult, though. Are you ready?

Decide not to care.

Yes, you gotta decide not to care. You don't have to be first and you don't have to watch it at the same time as everyone else. You can watch it when it goes to DVD sometime right after the final episode airs. You can watch OTHER shows. Other crime dramas. Other British dramas. Other shows that star David Tennant.

Here's a bunch of examples:

Tennant and another co-star, Doctor Who's Billie Piper

Crime dramas: Your broadcast network shows are still being broadcast! Surprise! Just ask your newfangled never-had-an-aerial-and-doesn't-even-know-what-that-is TV to search for broadcast channels. Check your TV's manual.

David Tennant: There's always some Doctor Who episodes to watch. That's where I met him. Netflix and Amazon Prime and iTunes has them, as well as DVD and Blu-Ray.

British Dramas: Netflix and Hulu are your friends in this regard. Netflix has 41 British TV dramas just waiting for you, including Luther with Idris Elba which is also a great crime drama.

Even if you bought Broadchurch from iTunes you would still be spending less for it, Hulu, Netflix and a broadband connection than you would paying the behemoth cable operators to deliver programming that interrupts you with commercials and costs a fortune.

Canadians! I feel your pain

People who say Canada and the US have the largest unguarded border between countries in the world have never tried to watch Hulu.
— Sarah Findlay (@s_findlay) March 9, 2013

I have never heard nor seen US/Canadian border issues more succinctly described. I feel your pain, too. Whenever I pine for stuff playing on BBC iPlayer. Cheers!