WASHINGTON — While streaming services may take a bite out of your paycheck each month, Hulu watchers can ease the burden on their wallets for the upcoming year with a Black Friday deal on the service.
If you sign up for Hulu's ad-supported tier before Nov. 28, you'll be able to take advantage of the company's Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotion, reducing the price to $0.99 per month.
There are some caveats to this deal. It is only for the ad-supported package, meaning you'll have to shell out more for commercial-free viewing, and the deal is only good for 12 months.
It's also a new customer offer, meaning it's only available for new accounts and accounts that canceled more than a month ago. So if you make a new email to sign up for the better deal, you won't be able to carry over your recommendations and watch list.
Even accounting for those asterisks, it's still a much better deal than the usual $7.99 per month that Hulu regularly charges for its ad-supported tier. New customers can also add on a Starz subscription with additional programming for another $0.99. Usually, Starz is $9.99 per month.
After the first year, customers will be charged the usual $7.99 unless they cancel their subscription beforehand. It could be more, as streaming services have been raising prices in recent years to keep up with increased competition cutting into their userbases.
Hulu is home to a number of popular original shows such as "Only Murders in the Building" and "The Handmaid's Tale," as well as a selection of cable shows licensed to the streaming service such as "Bob's Burgers" and "How I Met Your Mother."
Hulu isn't the only cheap Black Friday deal on offer this year. Walmart and Best Buy are offering sales on flat-screen TVs that you can use to binge some shows on your discounted Hulu account, and Target has deals on video games and consoles to complete that media center for the holidays.
This holiday season, carriers such as the U.S. Postal Service, FedEx and UPS are expecting to ship around 82 million packages per day — well below the industry's capacity of 110 million per day.
But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to procrastinate on Christmas shopping. Many of the most popular retail chains plan to bring back their regular prices after Black Friday, and even with enough postal workers on the job, it's better to be safe than sorry when playing Santa from afar.