Hulu Gained 200,000 Total Customers Last Quarter, Despite Live Streaming Decline
It can often feel like Hulu is an afterthought behind its corporate streaming sibling Disney+, but the general entertainment service also deserves its moment in the sun. After all, Hulu was one of the first purely streaming video platforms on the market and has existed in some form or other for more than 15 years.
Disney owns the majority of Hulu these days, which means it falls to that company to report Hulu’s subscriber totals every quarter. During Disney’s second fiscal quarter of 2023, Hulu added 200,000 customers, the company reported on Wednesday. The totals bring its subscriber base to 48.2M.
That is a slight change from last quarter, when Hulu reported having 48 million on-demand users. Its live TV streaming platform Hulu + Live TV did not see growth in the last three months, losing 100,00 more subscribers. Hulu’s subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service grew from 43.5 million to 43.7 million customers.
During the same span of time, Disney+ — the company’s flagship streamer — dropped 4 million users, while ESPN+ grew to 25.3 million users.
Netflix is still the world’s largest standalone streaming service, with 232.5M users. Warner Bros. Discovery comes in third behind Netflix and Disney, with 97.6M streaming customers between HBO Max and discovery+. Peacock has 22M users now, and Paramount+ is currently sitting at 60M thanks to its first quarter additions. Neither Prime Video nor Apple TV+ report their subscriber totals publicly.
One of the biggest recent stories about Hulu was the confirmation from Disney CEO Bob Iger that he was open to selling the service as part of a company-wide pullback on general entertainment. Iger said during Disney’s last quarterly earnings call that he planned to reduce the amount of general entertainment offered by Disney through a program of “aggressive” curation. Disney currently owns 67% of Hulu, while the other 33% is held by Comcast.
That situation led to more speculation about the future of Hulu during the quarter. Some have suggested that Disney might trade its sports vertical ESPN to Comcast to get full control of Hulu, while others have posited the company could swap its majority stake in the streamer for certain character and theme park rights in Florida.
Content-wise, there was nothing that generated as much buzz around Hulu in the last few months as the news that “Arrested Development” was leaving Netflix in March. Hulu streams Seasons 1-3 of the show, and many thought of it as a logical destination for Seasons 4 and 5 when it departed Netflix. Thankfully for fans, Netflix and Disney subsidiary 20th Century Studios were able to strike a last-minute deal that will see “Arrested Development” leave Hulu this year. Netflix now owns the exclusive streaming rights to the show, but Disney holds its exclusive linear broadcast rights going forward.
Netflix users who grew used to watching “New Girl” on the service got no such reprieve, however. On April 9, the comedy left Netflix for its new homes on Hulu and Peacock. “New Girl” originally aired on FOX from 2011-2018, and considering Hulu is still the home for next-day streams of FOX primetime shows, it’s a natural fit for the series.
Hulu
Hulu is a video streaming service that gives access to thousands of full seasons of exclusive series, hit movies, kids shows, and Hulu Originals like “Only Murders in the Building,” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”