Good news for Apple TV owners who feel like they’re not getting as much use out of their boxes as they’d like.
Today, Apple TV rolls out Hulu Plus in a software update. Until now, the $99 set-top box from Apple allowed purchasing selected movies and television shows via iTunes or using the popular Netflix service, but offered little else in the way of commercial streaming content options. A Hulu Plus subscription costs $7.99 per month and is billable directly to an Apple iTunes account.
The addition appears to be win-win for Hulu’s owners and content partners (Disney, Comcast, and News Corp.) and Apple. For Apple, this addition finally helps upgrade the status of Apple TV from a hobby project to a competitive consumer electronics product. Meanwhile, Hulu ensures it isn’t left out as more Apple TV boxes come into use as remote displays for Macs running the new OS X Mountain Lion. Also, because Hulu’s free website is accessible via a web browser, the new display mirroring feature in Mountain Lion means users can redirect a Hulu video stream to their big-screen television. This new feature differs from Hulu’s previous stance where it tried to maintain a distinction between viewing its content on a computer’s browser and viewing it on a TV.
In any event, cutting the cable or satellite television cord just became a little bit easier.
[…] for free is a huge step forward. This is an especially good move because major competitors like Apple TV and Google TV have offered such capability for […]