Hulu's Free Service Not Ending, Moving to Yahoo View
posted Monday Aug 15, 2016 by Scott Ertz
At the beginning of the week, a slightly misunderstood collection of announcements were made by Hulu. First, their Hulu-branded free TV service was coming to an end. For the few of you who used it, the service provided the last 5 episodes of many TV Series for free with heavy commercial interaction. Once a new episode aired, the 5th oldest was retired and the new one would take its place.
Ben Smith, Hulu Senior VP and Head of Experience, said,
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. 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 second announcement goes hand-in-hand with this one, though. Hulu has formed a new partnership with Verizon's Yahoo to launch a new video portal called Yahoo View, which will offer the last 5 episodes of many TV Series for free, with ad support. If that sounds familiar, that's because it is exactly the Hulu free service.
The new service will launch using Hulu's web-based video player, will offer Hulu's catalog of content and will contain advertising sold by Hulu's sales team. In other words, Hulu's free option isn't going away; it's just being rebranded. It's always possible that Yahoo View might bring this content to native apps, making it even better than it was before.
