According to Dan Rayburn, Hulu has an in-house tech team busily beta testing a subscription system they’ve built.   Management (including Neo-Sub-Lover Murdoch) are being mealy-mouthed in official announcements about the ifs, let alone the whens, Hulu will actually launch subscriptions.Speaking as someone who has managed tech teams building in-house subscription platforms, my hat is off to them. It’s way more complicated than anyone thinks. Yes, you can buy a piece of crappy software online for $99 to turn your blog “into” a subscription site… but trust me, it’s crappy. For basic DRM, recurring billing processing, subscriber records, marketing reports, etc, let alone the kind of uber-sleak Apple-esque cart experience we’d all expect from the Hulu Brand, it’s gonna be a long tech row to hoe.Funnily enough, just before I built and managed subscription sites, I was the marketing director in the mid-90s for a publications such as Digital Video News and CableFAX Daily. Our reporters breathlessly dashed out exclusives about America’s upcoming “500 channels” future coming soon with on-demand video for sure! This was back when the Internet was still called the ‘Information Superhighway’.15 years later, we have 300 million+ channels online and yet we’re still waiting around for really, truly video on demand. As in any TV show or video that I want, when I want it, now, now now and yes I will pay a subscription.My step-daughter has to pay a PC guy to debug her computer every few weeks because she can’t wait for the new episode of House to show up on Hulu, so she downloads it from a shady Asian site. So, we’ve got this as a household budget item already.Yes, people will pay for TV. Even TV with commercials. If it’s what they desire to watch at the moment they desire it. Convenience is a mighty powerful motivator.  Not to mention Hugh Laurie.