Hulu Benefits From New Mountain Lion Mirroring Feature

After a painfully long wait, Hulu Plus is available on the Apple TV. Hulu subscribers can stream TV shows and movies from the service on their televisions, just as owners of Rokus, Nintendo Wiis and a list of other devices already do. 

Hulu Plus, the paid-subscription counterpart to free, ad-supported Hulu.com, has been central to television's transition to the Internet, where a small but growing number of viewers turn to watch shows. Apple has sold its streaming box since 2007. The device has been more or less an afterthought for Apple, but the company reportedly has bigger plans to disrupt the TV market with an HD TV of its own. 

Hulu's arrival is milestone for the Apple TV, which suffers from a pretty limited selection of content compared to similar products like Roku and the Boxee Box. The integration was reportedly ready from a technical standpoint last year, but got held up by "political" issues. 

So what took so long? Apple may have been hesitant to let a service that's so competitive with the iTunes Store onto its TV platform. And Hulu, whose revenue is growing but remains relatively small, may have had a hard time swallowing Apple's demand for a slice of revenues from people who sign up for Hulu Plus via the Apple TV. As with Netflix subscribers, Apple TV customers can use their iTunes account to buy Hulu Plus subscriptions. 

Whatever the reasons, Hulu Plus' arrival couldn't have come at a more opportune time for Hulu. Last week, Apple rolled out OS X Mountain Lion, which enables people to mirror their Macs to their televisions using AirPlay and Apple TV. That means anything that displays on the Mac can be viewed on the television, including the free Hulu.com site. 

This has long been possible with iOS devices - Hulu Plus subscribers using AirPlay to shunt shows and movies to their televisions. But, crucially, iPads, iPhones and iPods could never access Hulu.com. Desktop browsers obviously can, so Mountain Lion presents users with the easiest way yet to get Hulu onto their TV sets for free. Of course, anybody can hook up a VGA or HDMI cable to their laptop and watch whatever Internet video they want, but AirPlay saves consumers all that extra trouble.