logo
Hulu Is Letting You Try Out Its Live TV Streaming Service for Free

Hulu Is Letting You Try Out Its Live TV Streaming Service for Free

Yahoo02-06-2025

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Rolling Stone may receive an affiliate commission.
From originals like The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives to FX series like the hit comedy English Teacher, Hulu has become one of the top streaming services to watch thousands of critically-acclaimed and fan favorite shows. And while a Hulu subscription has always been a relative bargain at $9.99 a month, the streamer is now one of the best places to watch live TV online thanks to its Hulu + Live TV plan.
More from Rolling Stone
Sling vs. Fubo: My Honest Take On the Live TV Streaming Services
This Tiny Marshall Waterproof Speaker's Huge Sound Will Make You Flip Like Benson Boone
The Only Charger I Travel With Is Just $25 Right Now
The plan gets you access to 100+ live broadcast and cable television networks in addition to access to Hulu, Disney+ and ESPN+, all for just $82.99/month. That's less than the price of most basic TV packages through your cable provider, which doesn't include the other three streamers.
Even better: right now, you can test out Hulu + Live TV with no commitment with a three-day free trial here.
GET: HULU + LIVE TV FREE TRIAL
Read on for how to get the best streaming deal of the season — and even more streaming promotions to know about this month.
From breakout hits like The Bear to new series like Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, there is no shortage of new titles to stream right now on Hulu. As a live TV streaming service, Hulu + Live TV is also clutch for watching sports on broadcast channels like Monday Night Football on ABC, along with awards shows on cables networks like MTV, BET, CMT, MTV2, VH1, and more.
GET: HULU + LIVE TV FREE TRIAL
The streamer rarely offers promotions on its plans, so the free trial offer is one you'll want to take advantage of. The offer is open to all new users and any returning Hulu subscribers who cancelled their subscription more than a month ago. There's no promo code necessary.
Another way to save on Hulu? Get the Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max bundle deal, which gets you access to Hulu, Disney+, and Max for $16.99 per month — cheaper than you'd pay for all three individually.
Both Hulu and Disney+ now cost $9.99 for monthly plans, but the Hulu bundle, which comes with Hulu, Disney+ and HBO Max, costs only $16.99 per month (with ads) or $29.99 per month for Disney+, Max and Hulu's ad-free plans.
$16.99 $29.97 43% off
hulu bundle deal OFFER
With the bundle, you'll get on-demand access to Hulu, plus be able to stream hours of content on Disney+, including Marvel titles and Star Wars films. Your Max subscription, meantime, gets you access to all their original titles on the platform, from Succession to White Lotus.
Note: this deal is for Hulu's on-demand service, so you'll have access to thousands of shows and movies but you won't have access to stream live TV.
Unlike some streaming services, Hulu has set itself apart from the competition by offering a free trial for their ad-supported plan, letting you test-drive the platform for up to 30 days with some commercials before starting your monthly subscription. Want to watch Hulu (on demand) for free? Get a 30-day free trial here with no commitment.
get hulu 30-day free trial
Get a three-day trial to Hulu + Live TV here. Continue on with one of Hulu's monthly plans or cancel before your free trial is up to avoid being charged.
GET: HULU + LIVE TV 3-DAY FREE TRIAL
Another way to get Hulu for free? T-Mobile subscribers get a free Hulu subscription included as part of select monthly phone plans. The 'Get Hulu On Us' promo is part of T-Mobile's 'Experience Beyond' offerings. See if your plan qualifies here.
Best of Rolling Stone
The Best Audiophile Turntables for Your Home Audio System

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

‘Elio' Review: Pixar's Space Opera Adventure Needs More Time on Earth
‘Elio' Review: Pixar's Space Opera Adventure Needs More Time on Earth

Yahoo

time43 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

‘Elio' Review: Pixar's Space Opera Adventure Needs More Time on Earth

Watching Elio, the title character of Pixar's latest film, it's difficult not to draw comparisons to another child hero underneath the Disney umbrella. Introduced as a shy child reeling from an unspecified accident that took his parents' life, the 11-year-old bursts out of his shell upon an encounter with an installation speculating of life beyond the stars and emerges as a hyperactive, alien-obsessed weirdo who runs around wearing a cape and metal colander helmet, speaks in a made-up language he calls 'Elio-ese,' and drives his Air Force aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) crazy. From the tragic backstory to the misfit behavior to the tense relationship with his guardian, Elio might as well be the male version of Lilo from Disney's similarly sci-fi themed 'Lilo & Stitch' — it doesn't help that plenty of people went to go see the remake just last month. More from IndieWire Danny Boyle Says He Couldn't Make 'Slumdog Millionaire' Today, and He'd Want 'a Young Indian Filmmaker' Instead David S. Goyer Says Warner Bros. Execs Were Upset It Takes an Hour to See Christian Bale in the Batsuit in 'Batman Begins' The crucial difference? In the original 2002 animated film that introduced her, Lilo won the hearts of viewers because she was such a specific, sharply written weirdo. She was rough around the edges, bratty and mean, and with eccentricities — a love of Elvis Presley, a belief that a fish on her nearby beach can control the weather — that were singular to her and her alone. Elio is a teddy bear in comparison: he's too instantly sympathetic to ever get properly annoyed at, and his obsession with aliens feels more banal and less personal, a way of acting out after the death of his parents rather than a real passion inside himself. He's easy to like, a sweet kid voiced winningly by spirited child actor Yonas Kibreab. But, like the movie that bears his name, he's a bit too forgettable to fall in love with. Any Pixar film that's been released since roughly the mid-2010s invites a perhaps unfair game of comparison, measuring how it stacks up to the studio's golden period of the 2000s, when every other film they produced was an instant classic. 'Elio' certainly is a fair sight better than much of the company's latest output, which has geared more toward regurgitating old ideas or sputtering around in shallow storylines. And yet watching it feels a slight bit depressing at the same time, a reminder that where Pixar's films once led the animation industry, taking out there concepts like rats that want to cook and robots that want to find love and bringing exquisite heart to them, they now feel imitative instead of innovative. If there were ever a version of 'Elio' that had the spark of an old Pixar classic, it got shuffled out of existence by a turbulent production process that saw original director Adrian Molina, who previously helmed the company's Oscar-winner 'Coco,' replaced by the duo of Domee Shi — whose hilarious 'Turning Red' remains the best Pixar film of the 2020s by a significant margin — and Madeline Sharafian, known for directing the short 'Burrow.' Molina based the film's original story concept heavily on his own life, and the directorial transition occurred right around Pixar head Pete Docter admitting the studio would be pivoting away from 'personal stories' driven by directors to films with universal mass appeal. Certain elements of the script directly based on Molina's life, such as Elio's mother working for the military, got rewritten entirely. The directorial change-up feels readily apparent throughout 'Elio's' 90-minute running time. That's not necessarily due to plot holes or pacing — the film clips along its standard beats at a steady pace, only lagging during one spaceship ride near the end that comes across as pure filler — but the overall feeling that it's only dipping its toes into the emotional and creative depths of this story. Elio's desire to be abducted by aliens, a reaction to his miserable loneliness on Earth, leads him to send a message via a satellite at his aunt's base to the stars pleading for extraterrestrials to come abduct him. The message gets received not just by a spacecraft but by the Communiverse, a roaming planet-like spaceship holding an international committee of representatives from across several galaxies. Getting whisked away into this fantastically technicolor world is a dream come true for Elio, enough that he's willing to go along with it when the committee reveals their misread that he's the leader of Earth. To secure his place in their ranks, he bravely/insanely plunges himself into solving a diplomatic crisis between the alliance and Lord Grigon (a suitably hammy Brad Garrett), the 'blood emperor' of a warlike race of alien worms from the planet Hylurg, who seeks revenge on the ambassadors for rejecting his bid to join them. All of this looks fantastic — while on Earth, Elio suffers a bit from that squishy, rounded animation style that's recently become more or less Pixar's house look. In space, the movie experiments more, adding splashes of 2D graphic animation and gorgeous technicolor around the stately white spaces Elio inhabits. The alien designs are suitably weird and inspired, from the mind-reading floating flatworm Questa (Jameela Jamil) to the rock monster Tegmen (Matthias Schweighöfer). One can detect sci-fi inspirations from 'E.T.' to 'Star Wars' all over the film's DNA, and in its funniest and most memorable moments it takes cues from sci-fi horror of all things, including the introduction to Grigon's son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), which has a whiff of both H. R. Giger in the character design and Ridley Scott in the blocking. But, as fun and creative as some of the individual parts of this spaceship are — from the chibi supercomputer sprite that gives Elio the ability to communicate with other aliens to the cloning goo he uses to explain away his absence on Earth — on a whole, the Communiverse is never as wondrous as you want it to be. None of the ambassadors get enough individuality for us to actually care about them, and their actual goals as an organization are too vague to grasp. Grigon is amusing as a warlord who, at heart, is really a beleaguered dad — he reminds one of Bowser in the Mario games more than any past Pixar character — but his softness is telegraphed a bit too early for him to ever be a convincing threat, even to children. This wondrous world up in the stars too frequently feels more like an amusement park for Elio to run and geek around in than a living, breathing universe. The real problem, though, might be the material that's earth-bound. 'Elio' draws clear parallels between Grigun's issues relating to Gideon and Elio's disconnect from his aunt Olga, and his desire for alien approval comes from a deeply wounded sense of pain that he no longer belongs on Earth after the passing of his parents. There's some great raw material here, and yet onscreen it never gets to compelling territory. Elio and Olga are simply too generic, stock types that can be found in plenty of modern animated films, for their friction to ever build into something as compelling as, say, Marlin and Nemo's strained father-son relationship. It doesn't help that Saldaña, whose character is meant to be the story's heart, sounds like she's phoning it in a bit in the voiceover booth. There's no specificity to Elio's circumstances on Earth — his trauma from his parents' deaths gets mostly brushed over, the isolation he feels from his peers is represented via a stock bully, even the town he lives in is a generic suburbia — which makes his yearning to escape to the stars ring hollow. So, by the time Rob Simonsen's rather generic score begins to overdo the bombast and the film gears up for an emotional decision from Elio about where he belongs that it has to take more than a few logical leaps to arrive at, the pathos falls a tiny bit flat. It's difficult not to wonder what 'Elio' could have been like, had the original concept from Molina made it onscreen, and whether or not the more 'personal' version of this story had the sharp edges and specificity needed to elevate the film from a cute kids' film to something more meaningful. 'Elio' isn't a bad time at the theaters — it's pretty to look at, charming enough, and frequently funny. But by shying away from investing in where its main character is coming from, the movie makes his galactic adventures feel a bit weightless. Disney will release 'Elio' in theaters on Friday, June 20. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst

Disney and NBCUniversal's Midjourney Lawsuit Isn't About Money — It's About Setting AI Precedent
Disney and NBCUniversal's Midjourney Lawsuit Isn't About Money — It's About Setting AI Precedent

Yahoo

time43 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Disney and NBCUniversal's Midjourney Lawsuit Isn't About Money — It's About Setting AI Precedent

It isn't every day that individual artists and creators and mega-studio conglomerates are actually aligned in what they want, but that's just the sort of villain that artificial intelligence has become when it comes to the entertainment sphere. Last week, both Disney and NBCUniversal sued AI company Midjourney in a case of copyright infringement. For several years, there have been countless lawsuits filed by individuals against companies such as Midjourney objecting to the use of copyrighted material in the training of AI models and in these models' outputs. But two major studios teaming up to sue one of the bigger AI image generation tools for the same reason is a big step. More from IndieWire New York Indian Film Festival Highlights Include Shyam Benegal and James Ivory Tributes: What to See Screen Talk Previews '28 Years Later' at the Box Office - and Fall Festival Hopefuls Before we start holding up any studio as a defender of artists' rights, there's a very good chance that how this lawsuit ultimately plays out will inform Disney, NBCUni, and other studios' own playbooks in building their own AI models. For now, the Midjourney suit has the potential to set a precedent around artificial intelligence, how AI companies can operate or train their models, and have an impact on all creatives. 'It's going to be an important case that'll affect the rights held by almost all creatives, regardless of how large they are,' said Ray Seilie, a trial attorney with Kinsella Holley Iser Kump Steinsapir. 'It's a rare alliance in the legal industry, or the entertainment legal industry, where you see studios actually doing something that artists are 100 percent behind.' The 143-page lawsuit against Midjourney filed last Wednesday is a simple copyright lawsuit, even if it comes at the intersection of AI and bigger legal debates about whether AI-generated material can be considered copyrightable. Disney and NBCUniversal allege that Midjourney is willfully infringing on their biggest characters and IP and making a profit from doing it. It claims that anyone with a subscription to use Midjourney's image generating tool — and soon its video generation tool — can prompt the AI model to create an image of Darth Vader or the Minions, and it will spit out an almost perfect copy. The lawsuit includes some convincing side-by-sides of the real movie stills and the images Midjourney has created. It's not as if those examples are a close facsimile that can be mistaken for something else, they're not a parody, and they're not a transformed iteration of existing characters; it's just an AI-generated copy. That's going to be a problem when Midjourney — which has yet to file a response to the complaint — tries to say it's just fair use. 'Just candidly, I think it is hard to see how the courts will let Midjourney keep doing what it's doing without any kind of restriction,' Seilie said. 'To me, I think the studios have a very strong case here.' Seilie said Midjourney will likely try to say that it is just the middleman providing the tools, and it's the users creating the images who are violating the copyright and are breaking the terms of service. That is a stretch, since Midjourney profits off subscriptions and controls what its users can and can't do. Case in point: the lawsuit says Disney and NBCUniversal tried to get Midjourney to restrict users from creating images of copyrighted material, but it has ignored those pleas. Midjourney already prevents users from generating images of a violent or sexual nature, so why can't they just flip another switch to keep people from generating Yoda? 'Legally speaking, it's clear that Midjourney is willfully infringing. They're intentionally infringing, and it sounds like they didn't take any steps to try to mitigate or limit what the users could do on their platform,' said entertainment attorney Dale Nelson, who works with Donaldson Callif Perez and is former in-house counsel for Warner Bros. 'And willful infringement is far worse than infringement of the type where you have a good faith belief that what you were doing was okay. So the fact that they didn't respond to the studios' letters just doesn't look good for Midjourney.' Nelson said Midjourney may also argue that any ruling against them could have unintended consequences on the whole industry and what AI models are able to do. But the studios' lawyers have thought of that too. 'I think that they have made very specific factual allegations in their complaint, probably wisely so, that it's not a lawsuit just about all AI. This is a very specific use that they're complaining about,' Nelson said. All this matters to Disney and NBCUni because it represents lost revenue. If someone can just generate an image with AI of their favorite 'Star Wars' character, why would they want to buy anything specific from Disney itself? It could also be damaging to Disney's brand if AI can easily generate images of Disney characters that are more adult in nature than they'd prefer and let the average user distribute that image widely on the web. Seilie said this could be a very narrow ruling, one that only impacts Midjourney and how it operates or needs to operate moving forward, but more likely, any ruling will cause other AI companies to be proactive and change what their models can do or how they're trained based on what the court decides. They don't want their own lawsuits if they can avoid them. It could also just be settled with Midjourney agreeing to pay Disney and NBCUniversal a licensing fee to keep creating copies of their IP. But Seilie expects this to go deeper and believes the studios will want a ruling of some kind — and will fight until they get one. Seilie believes Disney and NBCUniversal will want discovery with the ability to get a clear sense of exactly how Midjourney's models were trained and how they're used. 'The studios want the precedent here,' Seilie said. 'They want a district court opinion that says that scraping data for a training engine or using copyrighted material in training data is a copyright violation. I think they're gonna want a ruling that says that, and it'll probably go through appeals.' Precedent is the crux of the issue here, giving the studios clarity on exactly what can and can't be used in training AI models, whether it's licensing someone else's to make movies or training their own internally. Because the flip side, should the courts rule in favor of Midjourney, could be 'earth shaking' for how the studios do business. 'It would be a sea change in the way that copyrighted material works,' Seilie said. 'We would see a lot of changes in how studios operate or how creatives, frankly, operate.' Best of IndieWire Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See 'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie Nicolas Winding Refn's Favorite Films: 37 Movies the Director Wants You to See

The Gilded Age Season 3 Schedule: Here's When New Episodes Come Out
The Gilded Age Season 3 Schedule: Here's When New Episodes Come Out

Cosmopolitan

time4 hours ago

  • Cosmopolitan

The Gilded Age Season 3 Schedule: Here's When New Episodes Come Out

For those of you who like beautiful costumes, fun set design, people with money, and low-stakes drama, you're in luck: The Gilded Age is back for season 3. The show follows a group of high society New Yorkers in the 1880s as they try to climb the ladder and stake their claim amongst America's most powerful people. It's dramatic and frothy all at the same time, and that's why people love it. So when can you watch the new season? That's what we're here to discuss. Here's everything you need to know about catching The Gilded Age season 3. Tonight!! Major news. The show premieres Sunday, June 22 at 9 p.m. EST on HBO and HBO Max. SUBSCRIBE TO HBO MAX There are eight episodes, which is the same amount we got last season. The first season was nine episodes, though, so I am going to feel a little bit bitter about that for the foreseeable future. We've been robbed! Just kidding. Episodes air every Sunday night from now until August, and they hit HBO Max every Sunday night at 9 p.m. EST. There's only one per week, too, so you won't have tons to catch up on if you miss a week. Here's whenever every episode will drop:

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store