Hulu Passes 800,000 Live TV Subscribers

The streaming service currently has over 20 million total paid subscribers.

Hulu's year-old live television service has passed 800,000 subscribers, CEO Randy Freer told CNBC on Wednesday.

The disclosure, a first for Hulu, comes nearly a month after the company revealed that it had passed 20 million total subscribers.

The streamer — a joint venture of Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal and Time Warner — launched its live television product last spring, joining the increasingly competitive landscape for skinny bundles streamed over the internet. Hulu's service, which costs $40 per month and includes a subscription to Hulu's on-demand offering with limited ads, offers access to more than 50 television channels, including the broadcast networks, ESPN, CNN and HGTV.

The live-streaming space has heated up in recent years as more companies look for ways to provide options to millennial cord cutters and other people who are frustrated by the cable options available to them. Sling TV, the first of these services to launch, currently has over 2 million subscribers, while DirecTV has early 1.5 million subs. YouTube has not disclosed how many subscribers it has to its live TV bundle. Others in the space include PlayStation Vue and FuboTV.

These live TV bundles have been seen as a way to staunch cable subscription declines. Earlier this year, 21st Century Fox chief Peter Rice said that all of the streaming bundles combined amounted to over 4 million subscribers for Fox and its networks. At the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, on Wednesday, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson noted that DirecTV Now's member base has helped stop subscriber losses across his cable business. "We were at 25 million subscribers a year-and-a-half ago and we're at 25 million today," he explained.

In addition to offering its live television service, Hulu also provides an extensive on-demand TV and movie library, including a slate of such originals as The Handmaid's Tale, I Love You, America and The Looming Tower.