Hulu Plus is Dead. Long Live Hulu

Hulu Plus, the pay side of the TV VOD service, will now just be known as Hulu.

Hulu, without the Plus, is currently the name of its free service. However, Hulu’s rebranding doesn’t mean it’s abandoning its subscription model. There are currently 9 million paying subscribers and are a significant part of its business.

The elimination of Hulu Plus is meant to, according to Variety, make it easier for the company to compete against Netflix and other VOD services. However, Hulu Plus differentiated between the the pay and free tier that the service offered. Netflix and other like services don’t offer a free tier.

So Hulu is the free side of the service. And the pay side. No confusion there, at all.

This flattening of their brand raises questions — will the free offering be eliminated? Will Hulu finally get rid of the ads its paid subscribers have to deal with? (Probably not.) It’ll be interesting to see what the next few months brings for the site.

Via Variety. Photo by Garrett Heath/flickr.