Here’s the deal with Hulu Plus. You pay Hulu $10 per month and they’ll let you watch every episode from every season of every show they offer from the likes of ABC, NBC, and FOX. Oh, and you can watch on your computer, your iPhone, your iPad, or your TV (provided you have an internet-connected TV or Blu-ray player made by Samsung). Hulu Plus will be popping up on the PlayStation 3 shortly, along with other platforms in the future.
And you don’t have to sit through commercials if you pay $10 per month, right? Wrong. According to a company blog post, “Hulu Plus is a new, revolutionary ad-supported subscription product that is incremental and complementary to the existing Hulu service.”
You will get access to all the episodes in a show’s current season, plus all back seasons of that show instead of the common five episode limit normally found within the free version of Hulu. This spells potential trouble for the following companies: Netflix, Comcast, Amazon, Apple (iTunes), and anyone else in the business of selling popular TV shows for $2 an episode or, in Comcast’s case, charging a bazillion dollars per month for 700 channels instead of letting you subscribe to only the five or six you actually watch.
Hulu Plus is currently rolling out as an invite-only offering but you can enter your e-mail address to get put on the list. Will you bite?