ESPN+ on Hulu Makes It the Best All-Around Streaming Service

EPSN+ is officially joining the Hulu platform.

Subscribers to the Disney bundle have been able to cut costs on getting Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+ at a discounted rate for a minute. Now, Hulu has introduced an option for subscribers to pay $6 per month to get an ESPN+ add-on through Hulu itself. Customers who pay for ESPN+ through Hulu and those who already have access to the service through the Disney bundle will now be able to watch live sports programming without ever leaving Hulu.

“Viewers can now easily switch from binge watching The Handmaid’s Tale to checking out coverage of The PGA Championship, and swap back to Animaniacs before they catch up on the latest from last night’s sports stories with SportsNation and then tune into the newest episode of The Bachelor—all in one place,” the company said in an announcement about the new feature.

The feature includes the ESPN+ library, live events, as well as its originals, the company said. Sometime in the summer, the platform will also introduce the ability to buy ESPN+ pay-per-view events as well (separate from the monthly $6 service fee).

Folks who already have the Disney bundle won’t have to do anything to get ESPN+ on their Hulu accounts. The company said that beginning today, subscribers will see sports content appear automatically.

The addition of ESPN+ makes Hulu a more direct competitor to rival services with diverse content offerings like YouTube TV and Sling TV, though those services cater more to cordcutters looking for a live TV experience than they do to on-demand streamers. Even still, particularly for streamers who want some live sports coverage in addition to a rich content trove of on-demand series and movies to browse, Hulu—which starts at $6 a month with ads and costs $11 per month without—is frankly a steal even after the additional $6 per month add-on for live sports programming.

With Disney+ having just crushed the 100 million subscriber milestone far ahead of schedule, Disney is making its sister services just as hard to pass up.