You'll no longer be able to watch New Girl, South Park and Community episodes on Hulu for free.
The company—which launched back in 2007 as a free, ad-supported service streaming full-length episodes of recently aired TV shows—just announced that it will terminate its free streaming TV subscription system, from now on only offering paid subscriptions to its users.
"For the past couple years, we've been focused on building a subscription service that provides the deepest, most personalized content experience possible to our viewers," said Ben Smith, Hulu's senior vice president and head of experience, to the Hollywood Reporter. "As we have continued to enhance that offering with new originals, exclusive acquisitions, and movies, the free service became very limited and no longer aligned with the Hulu experience or content strategy."
The company will notify users of the changes in the next few days and members who had been enjoying the free service will be offered free trials of the paid subscriptions instead.
But it seems like Hulu won't move away entirely from free offerings. In fact, the company also just announced a new partnership with Yahoo, which will result in the launch of Yahoo View, a free service allowing viewers to watch the last five episodes of ABC, Fox and NBC television shows eight days after their original airing.
In an effort to create a multi-use product that exploits all sorts of modern platforms, Yahoo View will also integrate with blogging network Tumblr (which is also owned by Yahoo) to let watchers "go beyond the episode in a community-watching experience and browse photos and GIFs from the passionate Tumblr fandom."
"It's an amazing place for fans to connect and engage," said Jess Lee, Yahoo's vice president of lifestyles products, to the Hollywood Reporter. "We've never had this standalone community destination."
These structural changes come as no surprise as both Hulu and Yahoo have undergone internal shifts in the past few months (Verizon purchased Yahoo for $4.8 billion last month and Time Warner bought a 10% stake in Hulu last week).
Will Hulu's latest efforts be enough to compete with streaming behemoth Netflix? Only time will tell.