Streaming ads are becoming a fact of life for more and more customers. As prices rise, ad-supported streaming plans are a good fallback option for audiences who don’t want to give up a subscription. Ad-free plans can include a discount of $5 per month or more off ad-free services, and that can mean the difference between adding another streamer to the monthly budget or not.

But which streaming service offers the best ad experience overall? Which streamers need to do a better job? Do all streamers present ads in the same way? We dove into those questions in a series of articles over the past few months, investigating 15 streaming services to see which delivered the best experience. You can go back and browse each article by article if you wish, but we’ve also compiled the key data points here!

Everything you need to know about ad-supported streaming plans

Which streamers had the best ad experiences?

When it comes to paid streaming services, Netflix had the best ad experience of any service. It held ads to less than five minutes per hour on all the content I tested, whether it was original TV shows or movies, or titles licensed from other studios or streamers. Netflix also had no ads during kids’ content, no pause ads, and ad breaks were almost always short, running 15 to 30 seconds in length.

Among free streaming services, Tubi had the best ad experience of any service I tried. There were certainly more ads than found on Netflix, but still fewer than on some paid streaming plans I tested. Ad breaks were consistently 90 seconds each, and while Tubi does offer pause ads, I found them to be mostly unobtrusive. I saw around four to six minutes of ads per hour of content, and was pleasantly surprised by the experience overall.

Which streamers had the worst ad experiences?

There’s no question which paid streaming service had the worst ad experience overall: Hulu. This service is not only one of the most expensive ad plans on the market at $10 per month, but I saw markedly more ads here than I did on any other paid streamer. Hulu titles feature up to eight minutes of ads per hourlong episode of TV, and ad breaks were as long at two minutes each.

The worst ad experience distinction amongst free streamers goes to Pluto TV, which comes with more than 10 ad breaks during a single movie that can add up to as much as 30 minutes of commercials. TV shows are also packed with ads on Pluto, and viewers might be asked to sit through as many as 15 minutes of ads per hourlong episode. Pluto was a runaway (un)favorite for this particular award.

Which streamer had the most unique ad experience?

I’d say Plex was the most unique streamer I tried in terms of ad experience. It wasn’t that I saw markedly more or fewer ads on Plex; the streamer offered around the same number of commercials per hour that many other streamers did. But what I did notice with Plex was longer, but less frequent ad breaks, allowing the viewer to take a step away from their TV without worrying about missing a key moment in their chosen show or movie. Plex ad breaks were about three minutes each, but again, I saw fewer of them per title than I did on other services.

Do streamers put fewer ads on original shows?

When I first began this article series, I was operating under the assumption that there would be at least one service (if not all of them) that had a different philosophy for rolling out ads on original shows and movies as opposed to licensed titles. But as I went through, I noticed consistently that streamers did not treat original titles differently than they did licensed ones when it came to ad loads.

Perhaps this is for contractual reasons, or maybe streamers just want to make the experience as consistent as possible for viewers as they watch titles across their respective catalogs. Nevertheless, I found that the streamers I sampled did not make any big changes to the way they presented ads on original vs. licensed titles.

How many ad breaks per episode, movie do you see with each streamer?

You can see how many ad breaks per TV episode and movie I observed while testing each streamer below. Keep in mind, longer episodes tended to have more ad breaks, and also that my numbers are an average of the ad breaks I saw. You may see a few more or a few less when streaming these services, but in aggregate, this is what you can expect:

How long is the average ad break for each streamer?

Once again, it’s important to note that this data is an average of what I observed while testing these streaming services.

How many ads per title on each streamer?

Which streaming services offer ads during kids’ titles?

You can see a breakdown of the streaming services that offer commercials during kids’ titles — and those that don’t — in the table below. It’s important to note that many of these streamers offer ads during titles that have appeal across age groups, so when you’re looking at this data, keep in mind that these are shows and movies intended exclusively for very young children.