Hulu is one of the most popular online movie & tv shows streaming service that has seen its popularity skyrocket in the last year. Hulu.com has been a great place to watch recent TV shows online for free.
The service was ad-supported so you had to sit through a commercial before watching a TV show or one of the free movies. One downside with Hulu so far was that you could only go back a few trailing episodes for any TV show. You could not see all the episodes in a season.
Hulu has introduced a new subscription based service called Hulu Plus.
"Hulu Plus is a new, revolutionary ad-supported subscription product that is incremental and complementary to the existing Hulu service," the company said in its blog today.
It will cost you $9.99 per month and here is what you get for it
- Every single episode of the current season will be available
- Watch Hulu in different media platforms
- Free iOS 4 apps for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad over 3G and Wi-Fi
- Intenet-enabled TVS, Blu-ray players
- Playstation 3 to get this soon and XBox 360 in early 2011
- Plus Subscribers get a HD 720p stream for all shows
At the moment, Hulu is taking only preview invite requests and testing out their subscription service. No word on if their service will be available on a Hulu branded set top box or if it will be available on the Roku box made popular by Netflix.
Although Hulu Plus looks interesting, between Graboid (for movie streaming and downloads) and Netflix we get all the TV shows and episodes (not just the current season) streaming to our Sony HDTV via Sony Playstation 3. Hulu indeed has the advantage of airing current shows while Netflix doesn’t. We tend to start watching a series after it becomes really popular. We are just watching Lost and in Season 3. 🙂
But, at $9.99/month Hulu Plus is looking like a real good alternative to cable TV subscription for sure. What do you think?
{ via Hulu blog }
