Hulu’s Live TV Service Cost To Go Up By 22 Percent On December
- Hulu + Live TV price will get ramped up again, as the company believes it’s still too low compared to the competition.
- The service will get 22.2% more pricey, and this is the second raise within the period of eleven months.
- Hulu promises to introduce more personalized plans, so we may be able to select channels in the future.
Hulu has announced a price rise for its “Hulu + Live TV” service, which will take effect on December 18, 2019. As they state on the official post, price changes are never easy to stomach, so they will make it easier for subscribers to use the service with more versatility, allowing back and forth switching between plans. In numbers, the monthly service subscription cost is hiked from $44.99 to $54.99, and an admittedly substantial difference that translates to an additional $120 per year. In January 2019, the streaming company had boosted the price from $40 to $44.99 per month, so this is the second rise in a year.
Hulu justifies this decision by saying that their live TV service has gone a long way since 2017 when it was initially launched. It is now offering more 60 live sports channels, news and entertainment channels like the ESPN, Fox Sports, CNN, TNT, Cartoon Network, National Geographic, thousands of movies, and an excess of 85 thousand TV series episodes from shows like This is Us, The Good Doctor, Family Guy, ER and Lost. Hulu considers that their offering is too competitive, as other services in the market cost a lot more. That said, the service executives believe that the $54.99 is reflecting the quality and quantity of content offered while enabling the service to stay healthy.
The focus will now be on the introduction of features that will make the Live TV experience more personalized. People’s content demands are individualized, so Hulu wants to address the specific taste of each subscriber by offering more flexibility on the selection of plans, both in terms of their length and their channel count. Maybe we will be able to select specific channels instead of getting the 60-channel mega-bundle. For now, these are just some generic goals, so we’ll have to wait and see.
In the meantime, the competition field sees the departure of Sony’s PlayStation Vue service, but players like YouTube TV and AT&T TV are still in the game. YouTube TV costs $50 per month, and AT&T TV’s “Plus” package is priced at $65 per month. Both of these companies have raised their subscription costs this year, so the price climbing trend is common for everyone in the field. Let’s just hope that this will be the end, and that competition will drive them back down by 2020.
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