TV Companies Plan To Make Hulu Suck Even More Making It More Difficult To Sell Hulu (original) (raw)
from the well,-duh dept
We’ve talked about how the entertainment industry is really good at killing the golden goose every chance it gets. Any time some new online service actually gets people to move away from infringement, the industry freaks out and complains that they’re not making enough money from the service and then tries to kill it. For example, the TV folks have made it clear that they’d like to kill Hulu even though they own it. They’re so worried about “cannibalizing” the old revenue streams, that they’re killing off the new ones as well. We predicted this would happen a few years ago, and it’s amusing to see it happening in real time.
Because of the conflicts between what Hulu management (who do seem pretty clued in) and their ownership wanted to do with the company, Hulu was recently put up for sale. But, now it’s coming out that the bids Hulu is receiving are much lower than the owners want — and it’s because they’ve made it clear they plan to cut off all free content from Hulu:
But the bidders all figured out pretty quickly that the TV companies who own Hulu now want to phase out free ad-supported content completely. So as soon as the current set of Hulu contracts expire in a couple of years, it would be back to the negotiating table.
Because of that, no one was willing to bid over 2billion—andtheTVguys(ofcourse)thinkit’sworthalotmorethanthat,evenasthey’retryingtokillit.Well,oneexception:apparentlyGooglewaswillingtopaycloserto2 billion — and the TV guys (of course) think it’s worth a lot more than that, even as they’re trying to kill it. Well, one exception: apparently Google was willing to pay closer to 2billion—andtheTVguys(ofcourse)thinkit’sworthalotmorethanthat,evenasthey’retryingtokillit.Well,oneexception:apparentlyGooglewaswillingtopaycloserto4 billion… but it would only do that under certain conditions (which likely involve getting the TV guys to renew/guarantee future deals). So congrats, backwards looking TV guys, not only are you killing Hulu, you’re killing the goodwill you build up via the company so you can’t even cash out on that.