Hulu’s streaming service surpasses 6M paid ‘Plus’ subscribers

Today at its “Upfront” event in New York, online streaming service Hulu announced it has surpassed six million subscribers.

Only last December the firm passed 5 million subscribers. Hulu announced the news while presenting its upcoming original content plans.

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Like Yahoo’s “Digital Content NewFronts” event, Hulu’s Upfront event follows an increasingly common practice among digital media companies. Traditionally, Upfronts are yearly media events held by the television industry, in which companies like Fox and NBC present upcoming prime-time shows.

Last year Hulu’s owners decided to stop trying to sell the service in favor of investing $750 million for original programming and expanding its presence. Since that time Hulu has launched a plethora of original shows and added tons of TV content from CBS as well as a modest selection of movies. It’s also refreshed Hulu apps on devices for the living room, made a number of key executive hires, and more.

But its the living room-focused Hulu app redesigns that may have had the largest effect on pushing the number of paid Hulu Plus subscribers higher. In a blog post, the company said updates to its set-top box apps (including Roku and Wii-U) yielded a 30 percent increase in total minutes viewed on the service. And that’s not even accounting for the recent screencasting update Hulu pushed out to game consoles last week.