Lots of speculation in the news about Hulu’s new owner. The Hulu peeps (Disney, NBC) opted against an IPO (initial public offering), and have an investment banker looking for a buyer.
Are we surprised that Hulu is for sale? Nope. In 2006 (give years ago) we posted that “Networks Pretend They Can Rival YouTube.” These types of things, I said, typically fail without “a STRONG intermediary is taking the lead and the individual players give authority and accountability to that player. Otherwise the interests of specific participants will almost always trump to collective goal.”
The news was dense with suggestions that Google might acquire Hulu. But despite suggestions Google and Hulu are in preliminary discussions, I’m finding that unlikely. Hulu is rumored to be trying to fetch $2 billion, which seems awfully high to me. I would suspect MSN or Yahoo would find far more interest than Google. The search giant paid less than $2 billion for YouTube ($1.65 billion), and I’m sure there is at least one tech company that would pay $2 billion simply to keep it out of Google’s hands.
What do you think?
it’ll be google
I’ll tell you why – MS has a piece of NBC, Yahoo is still broke and AOL, well maybe AOL, but why would they when they have TWC?
Google’s all Hulu’s got and if they want to fix that crap they call YouTubeMovieThingy they will want Hulu’s catalog. Plus, Google has gobs of money and needs to buy something so they can continue their quest to take over the world.
Jan- you discovered the nested comments! Did you notice any of the other plugins! 🙂 I think you make a really good point about Hulu needing to be kind to Google (search will drive video content). Google would be more useful to webTV if it owned Hulu.