This piece at Deadline is half informative, half pot-stirring.
When CEO and caretaker Jason Kilar left, that was a big sign of uncertainty and instability. This compounded concerns after rumors spread of News Corp and Disney possibly pulling out their 1/3 ownership stakes due to disagreements over the focus of the business (paid vs. free). The idea being that with them, their content would also go. Either or both would be a critical blow to Hulu.
Now, eight entities are actively bidding for the service, including an unnamed pay-cable channel. Wouldn't it be crazy (or great) if that turned out to be HBO? Amazon is nowhere to be seen. Some entries on list aren't terribly exciting:
KKR & Co.
Silver Lake Management with William Morris Endeavor
Guggenheim Digital
Time Warner Cable
The first three (SLM and WME bidding together) are private equity firms. They're odd fits or not likely to bid for the amount or package that it's speculated Hulu's board will go for, just as in the previous bidding process. Time Warner Cable is bidding to buy in an ownership stake, which is allegedly the opposite of the full buyout that Hulu's trio of stakeholders want.
On the very interesting side:
DirecTV
They have a very dedicated satellite TV customer base, but they want a piece of the streaming business. This could be a good asset for that, but only if they go with massive-scale thinking. My assumption is that they would want to use Hulu as an enhanced pipe that offers the content Hulu already has in addition to DirecTV's cable channel offerings. Content deals for "Hulu" would be lumped in with their existing negotiations, with the paid Hulu service effectively becoming the infrastructure of "DirecTV Instant".
For example, they could ditch DVR recording and shift to cloud-accessible files that don't need a hard drive or massive box like they do now. Instead, an XML file lets users pick up where they left off, wherever they log in. The bad news for existing users is that, in theory, the Hulu they know now might cease to exist, just like Blockbuster rental stores have.
On that note...DirecTV's ownership of the flagging Blockbuster service could piggyback into this, making a revised Hulu UI the unified DirecTV interface for cable subscription, clip videos, and VOD. There are so many options on the table, there's no solid way of knowing what DirecTV is thinking of for sure. If they're really in the game, they have to be thinking of something this big, rather than an acquisition that would leave Hulu largely untouched.
Chernin Group
Peter Chernin helped start Hulu by both bringing in capital partners and taking Jason Kilar's side every time that it mattered. I would be surprised if he weren't going for the whole thing, with an eye to run it in the successful way Kilar did. The open question then (and for any all-in buyers listed here) is how steep a price current Hulu owners Fox/Disney/Universal will ask for the content they are currently licensing to themselves after offloading Hulu itself.
Yahoo
This could be a great addition to Marissa Mayer's Yahoo-from-the-ashes campaign, in a mold that I would hope is different than the Tumblr acquisition. I'm not the only user who thinks that Hulu needs a big UI overhaul, across set-top devices and native apps alike.
Pushing all of Yahoo's exclusive video content to Hulu and leveraging Yahoo's existing advertising business feels like an excellent match. YouTube has an uphill battle in getting people to pay for anything, but Hulu has a multi-mixed model that encourages users to pay for Hulu Plus. Yahoo would then have a long-term model for their funding of original content that doesn't involve it getting lost in the glut of "anyone can upload" that is YouTube.
Yahoo-exclusive series like Electric City and Burning Love have been seen, but not as broadly as they could have been on a hybrid Ya-Hulu service. If I ended up coining that "Brangelina-ization", I hope someone credits me.
More interesting to me than all of that? Former CEO Kilar and former CTO Richard Tom have been recruiting for a new stealth startup in Los Angeles. Kilar's brilliant blog post about the future of TV still resonates:
Distributors will certainly play a role in the future of TV, but we believe that three potent forces will be far more powerful in shaping that future: consumers, advertisers and content owners.Consumers have spoken emphatically as to what they want and what they do not want in their future television experience. What we’ve heard:
* Traditional TV has too many ads. Users have demonstrated that they will go to great lengths to avoid the advertising load that traditional TV places upon them. Setting aside sports and other live event programming, consumers are increasingly moving to on-demand viewing, in part because of the lighter ad load (achieved via ad-skipping DVRs, traditional video on demand systems, and/or online viewing).
* Consumers want TV to be more convenient for them. People want programs to start at a time that is convenient for their schedules, not at a time dictated to them. Consumption of original TV episodes will eventually mirror theatrical movie attendance: big opening Friday nights, but more consumption will be in the days and weeks afterward. Consumers also want the freedom to be able to watch TV on whatever screen is most convenient for them, be it a smartphone, a tablet, a PC, or, yes, a TV.
* Consumers are demonstrating that they are the greatest marketing force a good television show or movie could ever have, given the powerful social media tools at consumers’ disposal. Consumers now also have the power to immediately tank a bad series, given how fast and broad consumer sentiment is disseminated. This is nothing short of a game-changer for content creators, owners, and distributors.
