By YOUNG MONEY Staff
20 August 2010

Where to go when you want to watch free episodes of Glee, Modern Family, 30 Rock, Community, Arrested Development and Family Guy? For the past few years Hulu has been the de facto - legal - answer to that question.

The service is a joint venture of News Corporation (the owner of Fox and the Wall Street Journal), NBC Universal, Walt Disney Company and a private equity firm called Providence Equity Partners. Now, it's reportedly planning to go public, according to the New York Times, in an initial public offering that could raise as much as $2 billion.

Hulu is a young business, still trying to work out if its "freemium" model is sustainable. The site, as its viewers know, serves up ads - three or four per half hour - but doesn't charge for the latest episodes of a show. "Hulu Plus" charges $10 per month and offers full streaming seasons along with iPhone and iPad compatibility.

This hybrid model can be lucrative, but it typically means that a small core base of paying customers supports a much larger nonpaying user base. Skype, another new-web darling, has over 500 million customers - but only 6 percent pay for the service.

Still, with Hulu being many young adults' primary media consumption source along with YouTube, a Hulu IPO could be an extremely lucrative proposition as it picks up the eyes of all the right demographics.