Anybody looking to buy a gently used Hulu?
Disney CEO Bob Iger—whose company finds itself ostensibly about to be the sole owner of streaming service Hulu right around this time next year—is making noises that Disney might try to offload its majority share in the company, instead. This is per Deadline, which reports that Iger (who announced a big restructuring of Disney this week, essentially un-doing most of the stuff his successor/predecessor Bob Chapek altered at the company during Iger’s brief absence from the big office over the last few years) told reporters that it’s “not necessarily the case” that Disney is looking to buy all of Hulu for itself, despite assumptions that that was what was about to go down in the near future.
For as long as it’s existed—i.e., since October 2007, when it was launched as a joint streaming venture from NBC Universal and Fox owners News Corps, with an open invitation to other TV makers to buy in to the project—Hulu has existed in a weird space in the market. In the old days, that was because it was a sort of neutral zone between most of the major players, with Disney and Time-Warner both buying big chunks of the company as the years progressed, securing room for their own shows to get some streaming air without having to grant a monopoly on online content to Netflix. (Or, god forbid, build their own streaming services, viewed as a ludicrously expensive and wasteful endeavor.) But then Disney bought Fox, and all its shares in Hulu, in 2019, not long before it launched (the ludicrously expensive) Disney+, and now it finds itself in the weird position of basically owning two streaming services that sometimes seem to operate in direct competition with each other. (Despite recent efforts to more tightly bundle the packages together—also a Bob Chapek idea that’s presumably in danger of getting tossed in the garbage.)
The crux of Iger’s sales comments this week, meanwhile, are related to an agreement that exists right now between Disney (which owns 66.6 percent of Hulu) and NBCUniversal owner Comcast, which owns the rest, and which says that 2024 is the earliest that Comcast can sell its stake to the Mouse. (Or, apparently, vice versa; either way, somebody is going to end up sole owner.) There’s already been some disagreements about this deadline—whoever buys the other’s shares will have to pay “fair market value” for them, and the two giant companies have already startled quibbling about what that number might amount to—but most observers have assumed Disney would expand its majority share out to being the sole owner. (Especially as Comcast has recently started siphoning material that would have gone on Hulu off to its own Peacock.)
But, Iger says, nothing is set in stone. “Everything is on the table right now,” he told CNBC today, “So I am not going to speculate whether we are a buyer or a seller of [Hulu].” Iger says he’s “concerned about undifferentiated general entertainment,” which is a mouthful that presumably refers to the wide grab-bag of shows and movies that currently fills Hulu’s rosters, “particularly in the competitive landscape that we are operating in, and we are going to look at it very objectively and expansively.” In other words: Make an offer, maybe; Bob Iger might be looking to sell.
