Hulu makes its move

It’s a deal that’s about a lot more than nothing.

Hulu, the streaming service part owned by NBC, Fox and ABC, announced on Wednesday that it has picked up the rights to all 180 episodes of “Seinfeld” and will make them available in June.  [I wonder if it'll be available to both Hulu and Hulu Plus.]

That’s 180 new reasons for people to ditch cable.

But wait — there’s more: The company showed off a new original series, “Difficult People,” starring “Funny or Die” phenom Billy Eichner and produced by Amy Poehler, and said it had made a deal to include Hulu Plus as part of Cablevision’s Internet package.

Either development, taken separately, would be big news. Together, they’re a possible game changer — which explains why Hulu hyped the announcement to the fullest, with Jerry Seinfeld himself taking questions from the audience at Hulu’s upfront presentation.

Has Hulu suddenly become master of its (online) domain? Not quite — but it may have made itself sponge-worthy.

• The addition of “Seinfeld” in a reported $126 million deal finally adds some incentive for “cord cutters” — those who have canceled their cable and rely on the Internet for programming — to shell out the $95 annual fee for Hulu Plus, the company’s high-end subscription service. But most would-be subscribers will hold off: Unlike HBO or Netflix, Hulu still doesn’t offer enough original content to make it an enticing alternative to cable.
• That said, Eichner’s show begins in August and is clearly a shot across the bow at Netflix, which already offers a comedy, “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” from another Poehler pal (in this case, Tina Fey).
• The Cablevision deal is tougher to understand. It seems like a calculated move to keep cord-cutters in the family, because they’ll still need Cablevision’s Internet service.

But beyond that, the deal seems redundant — why offer Hulu Plus as part of a cable bundle when nearly all of its programming is already available through Cablevision’s video on demand channels?

Neither company explained the deal on Wednesday.

One thing is clear: Cord-cutting is revolutionizing how people consume entertainment — and cable companies that do not adjust will be unfunny and die.