Hulu CEO says its internet pay-TV service Hulu With Live TV has signed up 800K subscribers since its launch over a year ago
Hulu, in a little over a year since launching its $40 monthly internet-streaming “skinny bundle,” has signed up 800,000 customers for the service, according to CEO Randy Freer.
Context & Ripple Effects
Hulu launched its $40-a-month live TV bundle in May 2017, packaging the linear channel lineup with its existing on-demand subscription and originals. By January 2018, source-based reporting put Hulu With Live TV at roughly 450,000 subscribers, ahead of YouTube's live service but well behind DirecTV Now and Dish's Sling, which counted subscribers in the millions.
First-order effects
- CEO Randy Freer's 800K figure is the first official number for the service, and it implies the base nearly doubled in the four months since the ~450K estimate — consistent with the broader momentum that had Hulu nearing 20M total subscribers in April, aided by Handmaid's Tale and Live TV.
Second-order effects
- YouTube TV, which trailed Hulu at ~300K subs in January, now has a clear benchmark to chase in the sub-million tier, while DirecTV Now and Sling's multi-million leads show the $40 price point alone hasn't closed the gap with earlier movers.
- Every incremental live-TV subscriber at $40/month deepens Hulu's pitch against traditional pay-TV distributors, pressuring the bundle pricing that DirecTV Now and Sling compete on.
Third-order effects
- The trajectory holds through Hulu reaching about 2M live TV subscribers by early 2019 while crossing 1M itself for YouTube TV — evidence that skinny bundles were settling into a market of a few scaled players rather than many niche ones.
- For Hulu specifically, live TV functioned as an attach product feeding the on-demand base that reached 26.8M paying US subscribers by mid-2019 — the structural pattern of linear TV being sold as a feature of a streaming library, not a standalone business.
The trend: Internet pay-TV is consolidating around a handful of scaled skinny bundles, with live channels increasingly bundled into on-demand subscriptions rather than sold as standalone cable replacements.