Yahoo has been named as the preferred partner for the US catchup service Hulu.
It comes as Hulu drops the final free elements from its own service and moves exclusively to a pay model.
“For the past couple years, we’ve been focused on building a subscription service that provides the deepest, most personalised content experience possible to our viewers,” said Hulu senior VP and head of experience Ben Smith. “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.”
Instead of getting free content directly on Hulu, viewers will instead need to go to a new Yahoo-branded portal.
A week ago it was announced Time Warner was taking a 10% stake in Hulu.
Yahoo View extends an existing agreement with Hulu and incorporates content from Tumblr. It’s expected to go fully live from the autumn.
“Video is an important part of Yahoo’s strategy and we’re committed to delivering the best digital video content to our users. To date, we’ve streamed amazing experiences across sports, finance, and news,” said Phil Lynch, Vice President and Head of Media Partnerships. “This partnership with Hulu is a natural extension of that strategy, bringing the best of TV & entertainment content to our lifestyle vertical.”
Yahoo is promising the last five episodes of ABC, NBC, Fox (8 days after original broadcast) and other network sitcoms, day-after clips, and full seasons of anime and Korean drama.
Yahoo View will initially only be available in the United States, where free Hulu content is also available on Comcast’s Xfinity.
