Hulu is owned by Hulu LLC, which is a joint venture with The Walt Disney Company, Comcast, 21st Century Fox and AT&T. Hulu competes directly with Amazon and Netflix. It was recently announced that Hulu had been experimenting with a new form of advertising. The new advertising model will be less intrusive.

According to the company’s press release, viewers are no longer willing to accept irrelevant, intrusive ads. The company believes consumers appreciate when brands tell their stories in authentic and integrated ways. This is why Hulu is on the verge of introducing the Pause Ad. Hulu believes that the ad format will be equally beneficial for consumers and brands alike.

Hulu’s pause ad research concluded that consumers prefer ads that are subtle and nonintrusive. Too much audio and video when pausing was considered disruptive. The new pause ad takes all of this data into consideration. In fact, the ad is viewer initiated. When the viewer pauses their video, the ad will appear.

The ad will be accompanied by a contextually relevant message and a background gradient to ensure the ad is easily distinguishable. Hulu has been experimenting with the ad format with Coca-Cola and Charmin. The company anticipates that the new ad format will be introduced for select content within the Hulu streaming library in the second quarter of 2019.

The full press release can be found here.