The video streaming service now has the rights to every episode of How I Met Your Mother, Burn Notice, Bones, Glee, NYPD Blue, and all 11 seasons of MASH, among others. The shows will slowly appear on the streaming giant in coming weeks, offering subscribers a steady flow of new content to enjoy throughout the waning summer heat.
Through previous agreements, Hulu is also the exclusive streaming home of a few ongoing 20th Century Fox shows, including This Is Us, Fresh Off the Boat, Empire, The Last Man on Earth, and Homeland.
This new deal helps keep Hulu competitive with other services like Netflix and Amazon, both of which are pouring much more energy into creating original content than licensing media from big TV studios. Netflix has a robust list of excellent original shows, and some of the best shows on Amazon are also house-created.
Hulu executives seem to be interested in taking a more robust stance in the current TV market, with Hulu recently launching its own live-TV streaming service for $40 per month. This especially makes sense when the company’s ownership is taken into account; Hulu is owned by the Disney-ABC Television Group, 21st Century Fox, Comcast, and Time Warner — all of which have a vested interest in keeping some form of the current TV production model alive.
Any way you look at it, adding 3,000 TV episodes to the Hulu library seriously ups the service’s game when it comes to comparisons between the Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime streaming services, with the full runs of popular TV shows sure to help drive a new wave of subscribers.
The company has yet to release a full rollout timeline for each show but all the episodes should hit the service by the end of August, if the company follows its stated goal of getting all 3,000 episodes up, “over the coming weeks.”
A full list of the newly added titles can be found on Hulu’s website.
