Hulu is lowering the price for its least expensive subscription plan while raising the cost of its live TV offering, a move that aims to bolster its subscriber numbers while increasing the margins on its most expensive plan.

Hulu’s basic plan — which lets users stream TV shows, with ads, but doesn’t include live sports and news — will cost $5.99 a month starting Feb. 26, down from $7.99 previously.

The streaming service, which last lowered the price of its basic plan in 2010, decided to further cut the cost after running promotional campaigns last year that discounted the offering to $5.99, according to a person familiar with the matter. They noticed an uptick in adoption and retention rates, the person said.

Hulu also decided to raise the price of Hulu + Live TV, which includes limited advertising, by $5 to $44.99 a month. This marks the first time Hulu has raised the price of its live TV offering. Hulu’s other tier, which allows users to stream TV without ads, will stay at its current monthly price of $11.99. The price increase will help the streaming service invest more heavily in original content to compete with competitors like Netflix Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. that are spending billions on programming. Hulu’s move comes after a similar one made by Netflix last week.

Hulu, which is jointly owned by Comcast Corp., Walt Disney Co., 21st Century Fox Inc. and AT&T’s WarnerMedia, is a valuable piece in the global chess match for video streaming supremacy being played by three of the largest media companies in the world. Comcast’s NBCUniversal, Disney and WarnerMedia are all planning to launch direct-to-consumer streaming services, products that would hugely benefit from Hulu’s subscriber rolls and its reams of user data.

When Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox closes this year, Disney will add Fox’s 30 percent stake in Hulu to its own holdings, giving it a 60 percent interest in the streaming service. Comcast has a 30 percent stake in Hulu, and WarnerMedia holds the remaining 10 percent. Fox and News Corp, parent company of The Wall Street Journal, share ownership.

Hulu, which said it passed 25 million subscribers, is betting that a lower-priced basic offering will draw more users for the company’s advertising business. The company said its advertising revenue increased more than 45 percent in 2018 to $1.5B, a company record. Netflix last week said it would begin charging users more for each of its plans. The company’s most popular service, which allows users to stream on two screens at the same time, increased to $13 a month from $11. Its least expensive plan increased one dollar to $9 a month.

Offred (Elisabeth Moss) and Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) in the second season of Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

George Kraychyk, Hulu