Light Reading Mobile – Telecom News, Analysis, Events, and Research
LR Cable News Analysis  

Hulu Brings in Billion-Dollar Bids

June 03, 2013 | Mari Silbey |
DirecTV Group Inc. and two other companies are each ready to fork over at least a billion dollars for online video company Hulu LLC, according to Bloomberg. While the bids don't approach Google's offer of up to US$4 billion (with conditions) in 2011, they do set the high-water mark for this latest round of Hulu negotiations.

Hulu reported revenue of just under $700 million in 2012, and has more than four million subscribers to its Hulu Plus premium service. It also has plenty of suitors, including Time Warner Cable Inc., Yahoo Inc. and former News Corp. President Peter Chernin, among others. (See Time Warner Cable Linked to Hulu Bid.)

In 2011, DirecTV competitor Dish Network Corp. was one of the leading candidates for a Hulu buyout alongside Google. That deal would have added significantly to Dish's famous acquisition of the Blockbuster movie rental chain, which also happened in 2011. Dish's plan was to turn the Blockbuster assets into an online Netflix Inc. competitor, but Chairman of the Board Charlie Ergen gave up the dream in late 2012. (See Dish, Google Close In on Hulu and Cox Aligns with New Starz Streams.)

Unlike Blockbuster, Hulu doesn't have the baggage of bricks-and-mortar retail stores. It also has that significant built-in online subscriber base.

While Hulu has declined acquisition offers in the past, the bidding war now underway increases the likelihood that current owners Walt Disney Co., News Corp, and Comcast Corp. will agree to sell this time around. Hulu's board is reportedly working to whittle down the number of buyout offers under consideration from seven to three or four in the next few weeks.

— Mari Silbey, Special to Light Reading Cable



Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Network Computing encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Network Computing moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. Network Computing further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
 
Related Content
Most Popular
Read
White Papers SPONSORED CONTENT
Featured
Resource Library SPONSORED CONTENT
Docsis Provisioning of EPON (DPoE)
CableLabs spec that blends Docsis-style provisioning with EPON