I live in Denver, Colorado. It looks like Hulu has servers located in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, right on the Centurylink network. Actually, they're Akamai servers, but still. Hulu has servers right next to a VPS in Los Angeles I have access to. Google appears to do the same, without Akamai. Your anti-congestion argument fails. It appears that large content providers co-locate servers on lots of networks.

So apparently Verizon's bytes are slippery or smaller than other people's bytes. Maybe they use smaller bits or something?