Hulu Plus: $10 Per Month for Every Episode of Every Show You Watch
June 30, 2010 by Holly
Filed Under Tech Industry, Technology
The internet television website Hulu is going the way all successful free services go eventually–they want your money.
Hulu Plus is a monthly subscription service that will give you access to every episode of every show they have available; shows from networks like ABC, NBC, FOX, and others. The paid service also includes every episode of past seasons, instead of just the most-recent four or five episodes of the current season, as it is currently set up.
For $10 per month, you will gain access to any and all episodes of a show on your computer, iPhone, iPad, as well as on your television, if you have an internet-connected TV or Blu-Ray player. Hulu Plus will also be made available on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, as well as on other platforms in the future.
Paying $10 a month to get Hulu (almost) everywhere you want it and gaining access to not just current and future episodes of your favorite shows, but also to all past episodes as well seems like a pretty sweet deal. However, I was pretty disappointed to see that Hulu will be keeping their commercials, even for people who pay the monthly service fee. Not only that, but they have worded it in such a way that they want you, the person paying $10 every month for their service, to get excited about getting to watch ads. In a company blog post, they had this to say about their ad-supported pay service: “Hulu Plus is a new, revolutionary ad-supported subscription product that is incremental and complementary to the existing Hulu service.”
Yeah… I get that the people behind Hulu want to make money. I understand that any business needs to make money and when there is a way for them to make more of it, they should take it. But they will be making money from the people who choose to frequent the Hulu Plus service and who will be paying for that service. I think the most logical move here would be to keep the ads on the free version of Hulu, leaving it as it is now, but do away with them for the people who are putting money in their pockets.
Hulu Plus will quickly become a threat to services like Netflix, Amazon and iTunes, who currently charge upwards of $2 per episode. People who watch more than 5 episodes of a show a month will see substantial savings when they opt to utilize Hulu Plus.
Hulu Plus is invite-only as they roll out the new service, obviously taking a few pointers from Google when they introduced people to browser-supported email with Gmail, which you could only gain access to with an invitation from a friend who was already a Gmail user. If you’re excited about Hulu’s new service, you can sign up for an invite and wait until one becomes available.
