Gee's Blog World: Hulu Plus: $10/mo for HD streaming, more episodes, iPhone and iPad support

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Hulu Plus: $10/mo for HD streaming, more episodes, iPhone and iPad support

Hulu's much-anticipated monthly subscription service has arrived. It's called Hulu Plus, and it offers all of the features we've heard rumors about for months: HD streaming, access to more episodes and the ability to watch Hulu on your TV are all included. The price is also just as anticipated: $10/mo.

Two things weren't entirely anticipated about Hulu Plus, though. One: iPad and iPhone support, but no support for Android. This is interesting stuff, considering that Hulu was one of the few Flash holdouts that Adobe was using to prove Steve Jobs wrong and show that the web still runs on Flash. Now Apple can say iOS devices have Hulu, and now Hulu can say it works with iOS devices. I'm not sure which is more important.

Two: the ads. We thought paying $10 a month would get around Hulu ads, but that's not the case. Even Plus subscribers will still have to watch a few commercials. There's a bit of an uproar about this right now, but people pay a lot more than $10/mo for cable, and they still have to watch ads on most of those channels. Is it really that big a deal?

The bandwidth definitely might be a big deal, though. We'll have to wait and see what effect this will have on Internet service providers. On a related note, I really, really wish I had kept my unlimited data plan for iPhone. Doh!