There is a free one week trial for Hulu Plus (or a month if you have a .edu email). I just tried it and hated it. The commercials were a big issue for me. Not just because there were commercials, but because they seemed to play at the drop of a hat. I rewound a show a bit because I'd missed something and had to sit through the same commercials again. As far as I could tell, it also didn't save your progress like Netflix does. So if I stopped an episode midway through, it didn't remember where I was, so when I went to play it again, I had to sit through the commercials AGAIN and then fast forward to where I was. Hulu Plus also paused a lot more often than Netflix does (we were watching through our PS3). Several times it just stopped altogether and I had to restart my system and try again. (Which of course led to more commercials).
I was also really disappointed in the selection. It's just not big enough. I think there were less than 600 complete tv series available, which may sound like a lot, but it's really not. I was hoping for that last season of Community. Nope. Only 5 episodes available. I thought I'd give Cougar Town a try. Too bad, only season 2 was available. They did have Spaced, but no IT Crowd. And the movies weren't even worth looking at. I browsed a bit and then quickly stopped because I didn't recognize any of them.
We cancelled before the free week was up (after we burned through season 3 of Parks and Recreation).
I'm not thrilled with Netflix for the huge price increase, so we'll probably be cancelling our live streaming. (And if Blockbuster lowered it's prices, I'd switch to them in a heartbeat). I figure if there's a bunch of stuff we want to watch on live streaming, we can activate it for a month, burn through everything, then cancel again.