Hulu Plus is sluggish or constantly buffers. Why?

Comparing what can arguably considered two of the biggest or most famous streaming services from the USA, Netflix and Hulu, they seem to stream video content differently.

For most devices, Hulu tries to stream at a constant quality, whereas Netflix is more liberal in raising and lowering your picture quality depending on the speed.

For example, if your speed at any one time is below a certain threshold, Hulu will constantly broadcast low quality video from then onwards. Netflix on the other hand, will constantly change between HD and SD quality on-the-fly whenever the situation requires it.

Because of the way Hulu handles streaming, sometimes alot of unique problems can surface while using that service.

Some problems include:

1) Video constantly pauses for no reason and then resumes playing. (This goes on forever until you quit the app)

2) Video performance is rubbish(at times below SD) despite the fact that your connection is more than enough for a HD feed.

3) Video just does not play and Hulu returns an error as you press the play button.

Unfortunately we can't pinpoint exactly what the issue is as they seem to be Hulu specific. What we can think of is that its their streaming method that brings about these issues.

However, we can suggest a few steps to try and overcome these problems:

1) If the video constantly pauses and resumes, please try manually pausing the video for a few seconds and resume playing.

2) If the step above fails, restart the app. Please exit the app completely and go back in and try the video again. Please note that some devices, such as the Xbox One will not close the app until you instruct it to do so. Simply pressing the Home button will only minimise any active apps.

3) Please try rebooting your device as well as your Internet router.

If the above steps don't work and the problem persists, we'd suggest that you try a different device. From our experience, when one device plays Hulu sluggishly, another device which is connected to the same router most of the time plays Hulu Plus content just fine. Because of this peculiar behaviour, we think the device in question also communicates with an external server and that server could be the one causing the playback problems. 

For example, if we're talking about the Xbox One and the Playstation 4, we've noticed that in some instances, Hulu Plus plays at Full HD from the get go on the Playstation 4. No buffering, no compression artifacts, just a perfect video! But when we switch over to the Xbox One just seconds later, the video plays horribly and chugs along slowly.

Please give the steps above a try and let us know if you need any further assistance by contacting our support team at support@simpletelly.com