Hulu Plus Chromecast Support Hits iPhone App

Hulu has added Hulu Plus Chromecast support to its iPhone app, allowing users of Apple's smartphone to control playback of the on-demand video service through the compact media adapter. Hulu Plus first made an appearance on Google's streaming dongle at the start of the month, but was only available on the iPad version of the app.

As with other Chromecast media support, the app itself doesn't actually stream content to the adapter. Instead, it establishes a new stream directly between Hulu's servers and the Chromecast, with the smartphone acting as a remote control but otherwise being free to handle other tasks, like web browsing and email.

However, while initial reviews of the Chromecast – ours included – were generally positive, the limited number of services the dongle supported streaming for led to user criticism. That wasn't helped by Google's decision to block a popular third-party hack for unofficial local streaming.

The search giant said that it would add its own, official local streaming support for Chromecast in due course, but hasn't given a specific timescale for its inclusion. The dongle automatically updates its firmware to the latest version available, preventing efforts to keep it running older builds which still had the unofficial abilities.

You'll need a Hulu Plus subscription in order to access the service on Chromecast, while the dongle itself is $35. There's also control support from the Android version of the Hulu app.