What’s the ad experience on Pluto TV really like?
What’s the ad experience on Pluto TV really like?
One of our streaming experts tested Pluto TV to see how many commercials you’ll find when you watch the service.
Pluto TV provides hundreds of streaming channels, as well as thousands of on-demand video titles, and it’s all available to watch for free. Pluto achieves this by using ads to support its platform, putting commercials alongside every live channel and on-demand TV show or movie.
But how does that ad experience stack up to other streaming services? I took a deep dive into the Pluto platform to see for myself what you can expect when you try the service out. Keep reading to see what I thought, and how many ads you’ll see when you watch Pluto TV.
What you need to know about watching ads on Pluto TV
How many ads does Pluto TV show with TV shows?
This experiment is a little different than other streamers, in that Pluto doesn’t offer original content of any kind. It’s a repository for older TV shows as well as newer fare, but it is making its way without original TV series or movies. I tested “The Andy Griffith Show” as my half-hour series for this exercise, and “FBI” for my hour-long show.
During “The Andy Griffith Show,” I was treated to one thirty-second ad before the episode started, then three ad breaks of one minute and 15 seconds each during playback. All in all, this added up to around 4 minutes and 15 seconds of ads per half-hour episode.
With “FBI,” the ad breaks not only increased in frequency, but in duration. There were six ad breaks during the episode, and each one was two minutes and thirty seconds in length. This came out to 15 minutes of ads per hourlong show, essentially the same as on linear TV.
How many ads does Pluto TV show with movies?
I tried out two movies just to see if I had the same experience with each for this test. In the case of both “The Fifth Element” and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” I saw essentially the same thing.
Both movies had an even dozen ad breaks during playback, and they all had the same two-minute and 30-second ad breaks that I saw while watching “FBI.” That adds up to a whopping 30 minutes of ads per movie, much more than I’ve seen on any other service thus far.
Does Pluto TV offer ads with kids’ content?
Yes, I tried a few TV shows and movies in the Pluto Kids section. They featured the same ad break length and frequency as their adult counterparts; the only difference I noted was that the ads on kids’ content were mostly for other kid-related content generated by Pluto’s parent company, Paramount.
Does Pluto TV have pause ads?
Yes, Pluto TV has pause ads with and without QR codes for interactivity.
Final thoughts
In a word? Oof. Pluto TV’s ad experience was a rough go, by far the most ads I’ve seen on any service since I started this series of articles. There is, of course, a trade-off involved: Pluto TV’s content is completely free, and you don’t even need to create a free account to start watching.
But that’s also true of Tubi, whose ad experience I thought was much closer to that found on paid streaming services. Looking around the web, Pluto TV already has a reputation for having a heavy ad load, and I’m sorry to say that reputation is well-founded.
