Hulu may go commercial-free, but it's going to cost you

Hulu is considering releasing a version of its service without ads, the Wall Street Journal's Mike Shields and Shalini Ramachandran reported Thursday night.

According to the report, the new tier could cost between $12 and $14 per month, and could be released as early as this fall.

There are currently two versions of Hulu - one free, and one that costs subscribers $7.99 per month.

The free service allows for viewing of past and current seasons of TV shows, as well as other programming in browsers on PCs.

The paid version, which until recently was called Hulu Plus, has more programming, and allows for viewing on other devices, like game consoles, mobile phones and tablets, and streaming boxes that connect to your TV, like Roku and Apple TV.

But both the free and paid tiers have ads, something that paying subscribers have long complained about, especially as ad-free streaming services from Netflix and Amazon have continued to improve.

Hulu, which is co-owned by Comcast's NBCUniversal, FOX, and Disney, and is only available in the US, said in April that it has nearly nine million paying subscribers. Netflix announced on Wednesday that it has more than 41 million paying subscribers in the US, and 62 million worldwide.

The service, which like Netflix and Amazon is developing its own original programming to attract subscribers, recently licensed all nine seasons of "Seinfeld."

It reportedly came with a huge price tag of nearly $1 million per episode.