“We all groaned at the news about Hulu moving to a paid model next year,” says Chris Jacob in Gizmodo, but if the price is right—say, a Netflix-like $10 to $20 a month—it may be worth the cost. If Hulu owners NBC, ABC, and Fox make new episodes available right away, add more content, and give us set-top playback, “I might be willing to part with a few bucks a month and ditch my cable company entirely.”
Hulu “isn’t putting up a pay wall around its Web TV site,” no matter what the rumors say, says Peter Kafka in All Things Digital. What it is looking at is a two-tiered system, where the stuff already on the site now will stay free, but new “premium” shows will be added for a cost—or maybe pay-per-view movies and TV. Hulu is doing much better than expected, even “coming close to break-even” selling ads alone, so the extra revenue stream isn’t urgent.
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