Hulu Adds 800K Subscribers in Q1 2023, Total Rises to 48 Million

While Disney+ suffered a tough first quarter of 2023, Hulu edged higher. Disney announced today that Hulu gained 800,000 subscribers for a total of 48 million at the end of 2023.

That number includes 100,000 new Hulu + Live TV users. In total, Hulu subscribers rose nearly 6% year-over-year from 2022, when its Q1 subscriber total was 45.3 million.

For the same period, Disney+ lost 2.4 million subscribers, but ESPN+ had garnered 600,000 new users. Altogether, Disney’s streaming services now claim a total of 234.7 million customers, which does not account for overlap generated by the Disney Bundle.

Netflix is still the world’s largest individual streaming service, snagging a global increase of 7.66M users in its fiscal Q4, climbing to 230.75M overall. NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock reported having 20 million paid users at the end of the fourth quarter, more than doubling its total in the span of 12 months.

Warner Bros. Discovery does not report its two disparate streaming services’ subscriber numbers separately, but it most recently announced that it had 94.9 million users between HBO Max and discovery+. Last fall, Paramount Global reported that Paramount+ managed to climb to 46 million global users in Q3, seeing an increase of 4.7 million users in that quarter. Neither Prime Video nor Apple TV+ report their monthly user totals publicly.

The new numbers are the first public report from Hulu since it raised prices for both its on-demand and live TV services. It was a bit of a quiet quarter for Hulu and Hulu + Live TV as compared to other streaming services, but several big changes were made that could have lasting effects on the company.

The biggest change that could determine Hulu’s future is the reinstatement of former Disney CEO Bob Iger in late November. Iger is still expected to follow through on Disney’s plans to purchase the rest of Hulu from Comcast, but some industry analysts are wondering if the executive could sell Disney’s portion of Hulu instead.

In the meantime, fans will still be able to catch next-day streams of popular WWE programming on Hulu. Thanks to a last-minute deal between Disney and the wrestling promotion, “Monday Night Raw” and “Friday Night Smackdown” will continue to stream on Hulu the day after they air live on linear TV. The deal will also bring a new original documentary series to Hulu, starring WWE sensations Bianca Belair and Montez Ford.

Next-day streams of WWE series might fare well on Hulu, but the service would do well to consider leaning more heavily into its original series. A survey from December found that only 19% of Hulu users watch current seasons of network TV shows on the service. That number has decreased markedly since NBCU removed its content from Hulu in fall of 2022.

Audiences won’t have to worry about a similar move on FOX’s part, however. In late January, Hulu and FOX came to a multi-year agreement that will keep next-day streams of popular FOX shows like “Family Guy” and “The Masked Singer” on the streaming platform.