Hulu Dropping Free Service and Heading Towards Subscription-Only Model
Hulu is a well known streaming site. It is primarily television series showing platform that shows different series of different channels and streams movies too. It has been providing this ad-supported service for free too. But now it is closing its free service and heading towards subscription only model.
When Hulu has launched years ago, providing free streaming was a part of their mission. Hulu, as such was not providing a great facility for free but still had many many visitors on the site that use to stream for free. For now, the site has two plans $7.99 per month and $11.99. The first plan includes adds whereas the second exclude adds.
According to Hulu, they are stopping the free streaming to concentrate more on paid service so that it can give more content and also reduces the time between original airing and airing on the site.Hulu will give free trial for some time for paid subscription for customers using its free streaming till the date.
As Hulu will stop streaming for free it will be out of reach for many visitors. According to experts, Hulu will incur a loss on revenues that it use to get from free viewers. At the same time, it will also loose a platform to advertise its paid subscription. This step will also affect the marketing of the company.
Hulu senior VP and head of experience Ben Smith stated, “For the past couple years, we’ve been focused on building a subscription service that provides the deepest, most personalized content experience possible to our viewers,” He added, “As we have continued to enhance that offering with new originals, exclusive acquisitions, and movies, the free service became very limited and no longer aligned with the Hulu experience or content strategy.”
Hulu has also signed a deal with Yahoo under which, it will provide its free content to Yahoo View, the new streaming Yahoo platform. There are other sites too that show free episodes from Hulu that includes Vulture.com, People.com and so.
Hulu has also announced earlier that it will start service that will provide live TV programming by next year. However, the company has not revealed the price for same.
In an increasing option of streaming, it will be interesting to note the after effects of closing the free streaming service by Hulu. Time will tell us whether it will improve its performance, give tough competition to its rival or will incur a loss.
Most Searching Terms:
- Hulu Ending The Free Version
- Free Streaming Discontinuing by Hulu