At first, the thought of Hulu on a subscription fee sounds just awful. After all, we can get it for free on TV, right? Well, after looking at the specifics of the plan, the $9.95 monthly rate actually sounds pretty reasonable. The online portal is looking to start charging as soon as May 24, 2010, according to the LA Times.
What they're looking at is offering the five most recent episodes of the various broadcast series they provide for free. Fans who want to go further back would need to be members of Hulu Plus, which charges that $9.95 rate per month. But we're still getting more than a month worth of programming on demand for absolutely nothing. That's way better than what we can get on television, where if you miss a show you're usually screwed.
You can watch a lot of television in a month, and at ten bucks it's still way cheaper than buying or even renting all your favorite shows on DVD. Plus, with Hulu streaming through various gaming systems, you can still watch a lot of this programming on that big-screen television. It's like Netflix for television, and I don't think that's unreasonable at all.
By making a good compromise between a healthy amount of free content, and charging a modest rate for tons more, Hulu is taking a tepid but intelligent step toward training online television viewers to find paying for this content acceptable. If this works, it could start to factor into the fates of television shows on the bubble. After all, if subscribing customers on Hulu are streaming the hell out of 'FlashForward,' that's another source of revenue for the show.
