7 ms·

whoever buys Hulu is going to regret when they find out all the content deals goes up in smoke when the company change hands.

by gcb0 13y ago

1123581321 13y ago
An agreement to maintain licenses for a few years will be part of the sale, but it does mean that the buyer will have a limited amount of time to make Hulu licenses indispensable to the former owners.
jaredsohn 13y ago
Since some might not be aware and since you didn't explicitly state it, Hulu right now is owned by Disney (which owns ABC), Fox, and NBC Universal, which produce a majority of the content on the service. So while what you said may be true in general, it seems especially likely in this case.
- samwillis 13y ago
  Hulu is only as valuable as it's content deals. They will definitely be written into acquisition deal, no one in there right mind would by them without some assurance from the content owners that said content will continue to come. This is especially true when the content owners own the site!
jcampbell1 13y ago
The content deals they currently have in place are so one-sided that there little to be gained by owning Hulu. Their contracts are basically, you get a license to the content, but 95% of any revenues you generate must be given to the content partners. The whole point of Hulu was to stop piracy and return any cash generated to the content providers, not to be a profitable ongoing business. I don't even know what it means to buy a company that must funnel all revenues to content providers. It seems like Yahoo is bidding on something they won't actually control.
- jfb 13y ago
  Yeah. Hulu is 100% a creature of the content owners. It's not a business. What would anybody be buying? The brand?
  - immad 13y ago
    Presumably the users.
  - chollida1 13y ago
    The advertising stream? I've never seen Hulu but there would be a lot of chances to show ads on it I'd imagine. And yahoo is a company with alot of add inventory!
    - waterlesscloud 13y ago
      Of course, the whole point is that most of the revenue from the ads goes to the content providers, not to Hulu. Still, you can imagine a scenario where Yahoo signs an ad deal with say General Motors for an overall package for all their properties, and then throws in Hulu as a bonus. Keep the ad rates at Hulu at whatever minimum is written into the content deals, but use that as a bonus/loss leader for the real money that's allocated to advertising on the other Yahoo properties. Might work.
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    An "app" that's preinstalled or readily accessible on essentially every consumer device that does VoD? The number of those I can think of fits on one hand with a couple of fingers cut off.
  - drgath 13y ago
    > What would anybody be buying? The brand? And a viable competitor to YouTube's new paid subscription service. UGC was the big thing in video since YouTube launched, but the real revenue generator could be paid subscriptions, and that market is wide-open. Hulu doesn't -have- to be big studios.
- nly 13y ago
chollida1 13y ago
What makes you think that Yahoo didn't look into this? This would be the first thing anyone acquiring Hulu would look at.
mtgx 13y ago
That's why Google didn't want it, even though they were willing to pay twice as much as Yahoo and Amazon the last time around. But the networks wouldn't give them the contract length they wanted.

whoever buys Hulu is going to regret when they find out all the content deals goes up in smoke when the company change hands.

by gcb0 13y ago

whoever buys Hulu is going to regret when they find out all the content deals goes up in smoke when the company change hands.

1123581321 13y ago

An agreement to maintain licenses for a few years will be part of the sale, but it does mean that the buyer will have a limited amount of time to make Hulu licenses indispensable to the former owners.

jaredsohn 13y ago

Since some might not be aware and since you didn't explicitly state it, Hulu right now is owned by Disney (which owns ABC), Fox, and NBC Universal, which produce a majority of the content on the service. So while what you said may be true in general, it seems especially likely in this case.

samwillis 13y ago
Hulu is only as valuable as it's content deals. They will definitely be written into acquisition deal, no one in there right mind would by them without some assurance from the content owners that said content will continue to come. This is especially true when the content owners own the site!

jcampbell1 13y ago

The content deals they currently have in place are so one-sided that there little to be gained by owning Hulu. Their contracts are basically, you get a license to the content, but 95% of any revenues you generate must be given to the content partners. The whole point of Hulu was to stop piracy and return any cash generated to the content providers, not to be a profitable ongoing business. I don't even know what it means to buy a company that must funnel all revenues to content providers. It seems like Yahoo is bidding on something they won't actually control.

jfb 13y ago
Yeah. Hulu is 100% a creature of the content owners. It's not a business. What would anybody be buying? The brand?
- immad 13y ago
  Presumably the users.
- chollida1 13y ago
  The advertising stream? I've never seen Hulu but there would be a lot of chances to show ads on it I'd imagine. And yahoo is a company with alot of add inventory!
  - waterlesscloud 13y ago
    Of course, the whole point is that most of the revenue from the ads goes to the content providers, not to Hulu. Still, you can imagine a scenario where Yahoo signs an ad deal with say General Motors for an overall package for all their properties, and then throws in Hulu as a bonus. Keep the ad rates at Hulu at whatever minimum is written into the content deals, but use that as a bonus/loss leader for the real money that's allocated to advertising on the other Yahoo properties. Might work.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  An "app" that's preinstalled or readily accessible on essentially every consumer device that does VoD? The number of those I can think of fits on one hand with a couple of fingers cut off.
- drgath 13y ago
  > What would anybody be buying? The brand? And a viable competitor to YouTube's new paid subscription service. UGC was the big thing in video since YouTube launched, but the real revenue generator could be paid subscriptions, and that market is wide-open. Hulu doesn't -have- to be big studios.
nly 13y ago

chollida1 13y ago

What makes you think that Yahoo didn't look into this? This would be the first thing anyone acquiring Hulu would look at.

mtgx 13y ago

That's why Google didn't want it, even though they were willing to pay twice as much as Yahoo and Amazon the last time around. But the networks wouldn't give them the contract length they wanted.