Documentaries are coming to Hulu.
The web video service will add nonfiction films to its roster of TV shows and movies through a partnership just announced with SnagFilms, an online distribution system for documentaries.
"With Hulu we can delight viewers on one of the Internet’s most-visited video sites with a growing set of documentaries from our large library, and deepen the already broad set of entertainment choices that Hulu offers," SnagFilms CEO Rick Allen said.
He told TheWrap that while Hulu know’s documentaries are not their core business, "their audience has an appetite for them.”
In an exclusive story earlier this week on TheWrap, Allen said that SnagFilms’ founders wanted to provide viewers free access to a range of full-length nonfiction content — a model similar to Hulu’s.
"We want to start to open up the expansiveness of the audience by making it free, reducing the friction of trial and error," Allen said. "A lot of people love documentaries, but if you say documentary, they say ‘Ugh, that’s a little too much work.’ So we make it easy for viewers to find it, explore, and check things out."
The films to be streamed on Hulu will be chosen from SnagFilm’s library of 600 movies, including such well-known documentaries as "Paper Clips" and "Supersize Me." Hulu also will offer supplementary content, such as Q&A features with documentarians.
“We believe it’s important for our filmmakers content to get to consumers any way it can," Allen said, "And so we’re excited to feed the library of a great portal like Hulu, and we’ll keep finding other ways to make our library available to the widest audience.”
To that end, widgets, which embed SnagFilms’ movies on other sites, have been included on 20,000 websites since the site’s launch in July — giving a total of 300 million web-page views.
