Hulu, Inc. is discontinuing its free, ad-supported streaming service, and is instead offering some of its content for free on Yahoo, Inc., the company announced Monday.

The move by Hulu to drop direct free streaming, despite the company being founded on that exact model back in 2007, did not come as a complete surprise given their latest shareholder, Time Warner, Inc., has been opposed to providing free streaming services from the get go. However dumping the content onto the soon-to-be Verizon-owned Yahoo came completely out of left field.

Yahoo will be hosting content from Hulu under the Yahoo View banner, and will offer thousands of hours of TV, anime, Korean drama (their words, not ours) and movies including full episodes, films, and clips for free.

“Featuring content from Hulu, this Fall, Yahoo View will be the best place to watch the last five episodes of ABC, NBC, FOX (8 days after original broadcast) and other network sitcoms, day-after clips, and full seasons of anime and Korean drama,” an announcement of the service reads.

In addition, Yahoo is also giving the television streams the Tumblr experience by allowing views to “go beyond the episode in a community-watching experience and browse photos and GIFs from the passionate Tumblr fandom.”

“Video is an important part of Yahoo’s strategy and we’re committed to delivering the best digital video content to our users. To date, we’ve streamed amazing experiences across sports, finance, and news,” Yahoo Vice President and Head of Media Partnerships Phil Lynch added. “This partnership with Hulu is a natural extension of that strategy, bringing the best of TV & entertainment content to our lifestyle vertical.”

Focus

The announcement from Hulu that it was dropping free streaming comes at a time the company, which is backed by entertainment companies including Disney, 21st Century Fox, Comcast, as well as newly minted shareholder Time Warner, is refocusing its efforts on subscription services, including its forthcoming live streaming subscription television product.

Hulu already offers two subscription plans: $7.99 per month with commercials and $11.99 per month without ads. With a product that, while lacking the depth of original content offered by rival Netflix, Inc., offers a wider variety of content from television networks in particular.

While Hulu will lose traffic as a result of dropping the free ad-supported streaming service, how many of those viewers will migrate to Yahoo is an unknown quantity; will viewers seek out legal ways of watching their favorite shows, or will they return to pirating content?

Given one of the purposes of Hulu was to provide a legal alternative to piracy and many people would rather not visit Yahoo even under threat of death, you’d be putting money of pirate sites seeing a reasonable uptick in traffic in the near future.

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