Hulu Taken Off the Auction Block: Sale of Video Hub Tabled by Owners

By Dennis Kuba
October 17, 2011

After months of bidding, Hulu’s owners — News Corp., NBCUniversal, Disney and Providence Equity Partners — have decided to stop its sale.
“Since Hulu holds a unique and compelling strategic value to each of its owners, we have terminated the sale process and look forward to working together to continue mapping out its path to even greater success,” explained the partners in a short statement. “Our focus now rests solely on ensuring that our efforts as owners contribute in a meaningful way to the exciting future that lies ahead for Hulu.”
In a related TechCrunch post, it was suggested that media companies saw more value in retaining licensing fees than selling them.
Bidders were not willing to pay more for Hulu knowing that the costs for content rights would increase dramatically after the two year period being sold. (Google reportedly bid $4 billion, but wanted streaming rights for longer than the guaranteed “couple of years.”)

2 Comments

Benn Carr October 14, 2011 at 10:14am

couldnt get to the story, but it seems possble that in light of all the cloud service announcements recently, they wanted to hang onto Hulu…

Benn Carr October 14, 2011 at 10:14am

couldnt get to the story, but it seems possble that in light of all the cloud service announcements recently, they wanted to hang onto Hulu…

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2 Comments