Two Apple employees who weren’t authorized to speak publicly spoke with Blookberg stating “early talks that may lead to an offer for Hulu.” Hulu has thrown offers out to several large corporations around the world after declining to proceed with a $2 billion IPO. Hulu also has added two years of exclusivity for the programming on Hulu, consisting of content from the Walt Disney Company, News Corp. and Comcast’s NBC Universal to the successful buyer as well as renewed their current exclusivity rights for another 4 years.
Currently, the bidding is between Yahoo and potentially Apple. The current negotiation with Yahoo is pending transfer of ownership with regards to streaming exclusivity.
Hulu has some “nice technology,” but if it doesn’t come with exclusive rights, Yahoo would probably be better off just submitting a competing bid for the right to stream TV shows and movies. ”It would cost a lot less.”
Disney CEO Bob Iger spent time pitching to Google, Amazon and Microsoft on Hulu but non have expressed interest on entering a second round of bidding.
Google is considered a highly likely suitor for the Web TV site. It has the cash on hand to make a multi-billion offer, and it’s very interested in selling brand ads against premium video content. Google is also already planning to spend $100 million producing premium content for its own Web video site, YouTube.
The primary issue with Google is anti-trust issues that will arise by the ownership of both YouTube and Hulu as well as a quasi-monopoly of the online streaming market. As for Amazon they are in the works of developing their own and it might be less expensive for them to bid on exclusivity rights and use their own technology.
