Hulu, the streaming service responsible for wasting most of my time with their seemingly endless store of Real Housewives and Keeping Up with the Kardashians episodes, will soon stop providing free content and move entirely into subscription services. Where will cheapskates watch the latest episode of Once Upon a Time (one week late) now?
According to The Hollywood Reporter:
The streaming service is taking steps to shutter its offering of no-cost, ad-supported television and movies, a a core product of Hulu’s since it launched nearly nine years ago. Hulu will begin notifying customers of the change over the next few days, and members who have been using the free service will be offered free trials of a paid subscription.
“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,” Ben Smith, Senior Vice President of Hulu, stated. “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.”
The current free service is lowly trafficked, probably because of the limited selection and the high number of likeminded geniuses who’ve realized that paying for unlimited, commercial free episodes of Seinfeld is absolutely worth it.
To those of you too broke or unwilling to throw down for subscription Hulu: You don’t have to feel like a waste of space. Much of Hulu’s free content will be moved to Yahoo!, where you can watch a small supply of jumpy, commercial-heavy videos for the low low price of free.
