Hulu Plus Rolls into Roku, Monthly Price Lowered

Posted 11/17/2010 at 7:30am | by Paul Lilly

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In a blog post today, Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, announced that the Hulu Plus subscription service is finally launching out of preview status, where it has sat since July. Roku owners and PlayStation 3 owners with a PlayStation Network account get first crack at the finalized service, and in the months to come Kilar says Hulu Plus will be coming to a number of Internet-connected Vizio, LG, and Panasonic Blu-ray players and HDTVs, as well as TiVo Premier DVDs, the Xbox 360, Western Digital's WD TV Live Hub Media Center, and a whole bunch more.

"We haven't forgotten about our existing device lineup and applications, either," Kilar said. "Over the next week, updates to the Samsung, PlayStation 3, and Apple iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch Hulu Plus apps will be available, bringing a variety of bug fixes and feature and performance enhancements."

Hulu also dropped the price of its subscription from $9.99 to $7.99, which is retroactive. All current subscribers who joined during the preview period are eligible to receive a credit for the difference, which Hulu will automatically apply to their next billing cycle.

So how does it compare to Netflix? With the price drop, Hulu Plus matches Netflix's streaming service. The trade off with Hulu Plus is that you still have to contend with ads, but most of the content comes much earlier than on Netflix.