Are you disappointed Hulu’s free streaming service is going away? The company has signed a deal with tech giant Yahoo for much of the programming to appear on the new Yahoo View streaming destination. Free users had access only to episodes of recent broadcast shows eight days after they aired.
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The episodes on Yahoo are not now available on a phone, although Yahoo is working on a mobile web version and an app. Yahoo says the mobile version will be free, but it may not have all the same video as the desktop computer site because of content licensing restrictions. All the shows have five episodes each that are free to watch.
With 12 million paid subscribers now, Hulu continues to lag behind its closest competitor, Netflix, which has about 47 million paid subscribers in the U.S. The pricing, full channel list and timing has not yet been announced.
Hulu, which is jointly owned by Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal and Time Warner, has been quietly phasing out free content for some time, as it started offering more original programming like The Path and Difficult People and expanded its archive of complete series of current and classic shows and movies, all of which are behind the paywall.
Several other companies already offer live, paid TV over the internet, including Sony and Dish.
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Yahoo also has broader ambitions for View. However, its previous attempt at an online video hub, Yahoo Screen, shut down in January, despite having new episodes of the cult comedy “Community” after its cancellation by NBC. But the company said that they didn’t really fit with Hulu’s content strategy going forward.
