Hulu Will Sell Showtime on the Web, Too -- At a 20 Percent Discount

If you want a digital subscription to Showtime, you can buy one from Apple, Sony or Roku for $11 a month starting in July. But if you pay for a subscription to Hulu’s premium service, you can also pick up a Showtime subscription from the video service -- for $9 a month. The 20 percent difference in the two plans, announced today, says a lot about Hulu’s ambitions to build up its TV-on-the-Web service: Hulu says it will pay for the $2 discount out of its own pocket, in the hope of convincing more people to buy its base subscription service at $8 a month -- for a total of $17 a month.

“What we’re basically figuring is that by adding these two services together, we think that consumers are entitled to a discount. We really wanted to be aggressive coming out of the gate,” said Tim Connolly, who heads up distribution for Hulu. “We’re interested in selling Showtime, but we’re more interested in selling Showtime and Hulu together.” In that sense Hulu, jointly owned by Disney, 21st Century Fox and Comcast, is acting like a cable company, which will only sell you Showtime, HBO or other premium channels if you subscribe to a base package of other channels as well.