Hulu Owners Call the Sale Off

Hulu’s owners have announced that the online video site is no longer for sale.

After soliciting interest from Internet companies Yahoo!, Google, and Amazon, as well as television distributors like the Dish Network, they put an end to four months of prospective bids and speculation today.

 “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, ” said Hulu's owners, News Corp., the Walt Disney Co. and Providence Equity Partners, in a joint statement on Thursday. 

Comcast is also an owner of the site, but were not included in the statement since they gave up say in management of the company as a condition of their acquisition of NBCUniversal earlier this year.

It seems Hulu’s owners couldn’t find a big enough reason, or price tag, to give up the site, which may be one of the television industry’s best combatants against the Apples and Amazons of the world, who have flipped entertainment distribution on its head.

Unlike those competitors, Hulu’s content is provided directly by the distributors to the site with much of the site’s most popular TV shows being provided by the owners: Disney (ABC), Comcast (NBC) and News Corporation (FOX).

And yet, that too has its problems since Hulu viewers are worth less to ABC, NBC, and FOX online, in terms of advertising dollars, than they would be watching the shows on network TV. 

Still the amount of advertising dollars being displaced, was not enough for the site's owners to accept any of the several $2 billion offers, or Google's offer of $4 billon (an offer that also  stipulated that the company retain content for a longer period of time).

The question now is what the “path to greater success” will look like? Will Hulu continue to have the consumer-driven experience that we are used to or will the owners make drastic changes in the wake of  the defunct sale?


All the owners can tell us is that: "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."