Last week we told you that Hulu Plus had landed on Apple TV; news that left many Google TV users wondering when it would finally be their turn.  My contacts at Google have told me that there is still no news to report on that front, and it seems that is the same answer coming from the Hulu camp. Hulu Plus is available for other Android devices in the Google Play Store, so there is no logical technical limitation. So question still remains: why is Hulu Plus not available on Google TV?

Hulu has had a pretty consistent answer to that question over the past couple of years. Here is what Hulu employee Michael K had to say in a thread over at Hulu’s own discussion forum:

Although we don’t support Google TV at the moment, but we’d love to add Hulu Plus to it in the future. Lots of folks ask us about it, so we definitely know there’s a demand. Before we can support Google TV, however, we need to obtain a specific set of streaming rights for our content. In addition, we also need agreements in place with our content providers, hardware manufacturers, and Google itself.

There is no question that Google wants Hulu Plus for Google TV, and as we mentioned previously there is no issue from a technological standpoint. Google initially faced a lot of backlash from networks who felt the search giant was not willing to pay enough for their online content to be available on Google TV. Hulu Plus would be a different story, however, as content providers are paid for their programming to be available.

Google TV has not been the commercial success that everyone had hoped it would be, but there are certainly users who would be happy to pay for a Hulu Plus subscription if they could access it on their Google TV devices. With new companies like Vizio getting behind Google TV, or the fact that Apple TV now has Hulu Plus, we may see some renewed discussions between Google and Hulu. However, for the time being we have nothing left to do but speculate as to when Hulu Plus will be available for Google TV.