Report: Hulu Has Subscription Plan in the Works

There’s been chatter about Hulu launching a subscription service lately, and now Dan Rayburn reports that Hulu is already beta testing such a paid service internally.

Rayburn, whose sources confirm that Hulu-gans are indeed working on this initiative, doesn’t believe the subscription service will come to market this year. From his post:

From what I’m being told, Hulu has a very clear plan for the offering from a technical standpoint, but still is not completely sure how to roll it out product wise or what exactly the business terms will be. While the technical piece of such an offering would have some complexity to it, the real challenging piece of the offering would be the business terms with content owners.

NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker and News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch talked up a Hulu subscription earlier this week at an investor conference, and that’s not the first time this notion has been brought up, so it’s no surprise that, with two corporate parents bringing up the “s” word, Hulu would be figuring out how to make it happen.

The question remains: what will the subscription entail? Will it be part of other authentication schemes like TV Everywhere? Will it be additive, or will it replace part of the free offering?

In June we asked readers how much they’d pay for Hulu and the response was overwhelmingly “Nothing!” Is that still true for you?