Hulu Plus passes 1.5 million paying subscribers
An update from Hulu CEO Jason Kilar:
We grew the business 60% from 2010 to approximately $420 million in revenue.
That’s actually a disappointment, as Peter Kafka notes.
Hulu Plus has reached 1.5 million paid subscribers faster than any video subscription service launch (online or offline) in U.S. history. We are attracting more than 2x the number of subscribers each day when compared to this time last year.
That’s still less than 10% of Netflix’s subscriber base, but they’re also significantly different products. That said, they’ll be increasingly competing for content deals, and Kilar has something to say about that, too:
At scale, our model allows us to profitably pay content owners approximately 50% more in content licensing fees per subscriber when compared to other similarly priced online subscription services. We believe our approach will enable us to secure more valuable content for our users and to secure content in more attractive windows than would otherwise be possible. To that end, we are excited to invest approximately half a billion in content in 2012 on behalf of our users.
Bigger question: Will Jason Kilar still be Hulu’s CEO by this time next year?
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