Even as the Hulu streaming TV show and movie service has a "For Sale" sign up, the company is promoting the growth it has achieved so far with its paid Hulu Plus subscription service. In a post on the company"s official blog site, Hulu"s CEO Jason Kilar stated that Hulu Plus currently has 875,000 paid subscribers. The month of June 2011 was especially good for the $7.99 a month service. Kilar writes that "we added more paying subscribers in June than we did in April and May combined." He predicts that Hulu Plus will officially reach the 1 million subscriber milestone "before the end of this summer." If that happens it will beat the company"s previous expectations of reaching that goal before the end of 2011.
The number of hours of video accessible by users of the Hulu service has also expanded greatly, according to the blog post. From November 2010, the launch of Hulu Plus, until now the video hours has increased from 9,000 to 15,000. While the service is known mostly for its TV show, Hulu has also expanded its feature film library from 450 to 1,450 in the same time period. Hulu has also been expanding into original content: It has the exclusive rights in the US to the UK TV series Misfits which began running on Hulu on June 20. Hulu also gets a large chuck of revenue via ads and Kilar states that they expect to get 500 million in revenue by the end of 2011.
The blog post did not mention anything about Hulu"s current efforts to put itself up for sale. Rumors are that Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have all expressed interest in buying the company.