Hulu has announced that it will finally bring offline viewing to the broadcast service later this year for both Hulu with Ads and with the basic subscription levels of Hulu.
It is the last of a shootout against Amazon Prime and Netflix, both announced to see them offline more than a year ago and have supported it since then.
While the news means that you will finally be able to watch programs from Fox, Disney, NBC, CBS and others on airplanes and areas with little or no cellular reception, there is also an important advantage to the agreement: If you are a Subscriber of Hulu with Ads, you are going to download the announcements that you would have seen online in each episode .
Offline viewing is being implemented in this way, apparently, to placate advertisers and broadcasters who have Hulu to display ads in front of their content. While that sounds disturbing, the most positive thing is that it could encourage programs and movies that might not have allowed offline viewing in the past to warm up the idea.
Hulu also used the forum where it announced the news offline to talk about its other advertising initiative: dynamic ads that will interrupt the content during live segments for its Hulu customers with Live TV. Hulu imagines that these ads will appear among the news and sports segments where the ads are not currently, although he has not indicated when these dynamic ads would enter the service.
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Advocates of a better streaming experience will see ads as a major problem, since Hulu is using storage space on their device for ads and that was one of the reasons why offline viewing so far It has been free of ads.
The fear here, some might think, is that Hulu's decision could create a new standard for paid transmission services, one in which money is paid for downloadable content download service, but that content will also come with notices Imagine if Google Play Movies rented you a TV series for $ 3.99 per episode and then played commercials every seven or eight minutes, just like traditional cable TV networks.
To cushion the blow, Hulu has also announced an agreement with Dreamworks Animation Studios that the streaming service will be the exclusive home of several films, including How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Boss Baby 2 and Trolls 2 in 2019, plus some of the oldest movies from the film studio like Shrek and Shark Tale in 2020.
If the year 2020 seems too far away, you can expect new original Hulu content from this year: Hulu announced a series of new series including projects by JJ Abrams, Stephen King, Mindy Kaling, George Clooney, Reese Witherspoon and Kerri Washington, the first of which, called Castle Rock, will debut on July 25.
Via TechCrunch
