It was announced today that Hulu Plus (the 9 buck a month subscription version of Hulu) will be available soon on Roku boxes and next year it will be on XBox. This is a great move for people who are tired of paying top dollar for cable or DirecTV (although the NFL Sunday Ticket still makes DirecTV a must have) as you now can watch most shows through your Roku or XBox as well as a good number of movies via Netflix Instant Streaming.

While I'm excited about the news, I also have to wonder if this isn't a trial balloon for the networks. If this succeeds, might they all pull their shows off of Hulu and start their own pay-to-play channels? It's honestly not a terrible idea. It's a good way to get people to at least check out their new shows (I mean, you're paying for it, why not give it a shot) and it also could make internet content more accessible which, of course, could lead to more backdoor pilots, i.e, shows that start off as web series and then, if they are popular, get promoted to a full-on TV series. I could envision a lot of networks creating their own kind of Adult Swim-esque shows. Shoot a bunch of shows in short form, package them together, develop the ones that seem to get the most loyal following. The good thing about this is that it'll be more work for creative types in Hollywood but that downside is that people won't be making as much money since the internet shows don't pay remotely as much as TV fare.

Another reason something like this could happen is if other networks start lagging behind financially. It was recently reported that NBC/Universal's cable channels are doing quite well while NBC itself is a six hundred million dollar a year in losses sinkhole. If NBC/Universal can package all of their shows together on Roku or XBox (while still getting to pay less to make the "cable" shows) it could help out the whole team. Granted, I'm not sure how fired up Comcast, who just bought NBC, is going to be about this new direction but maybe having their own network and stable of cable channels is something that can give them leverage or, at least, a dog in the online fight. (Get your internet via Comcast and you can download shows from NBC, USA, Bravo, etc. for free.) We're still probably five or so years from something major actually happening but it should be interesting to see how this all shakes out.