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Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

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Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#51

Post by Retric »

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #45

Can anyone explain why Hulu wants to sell to a third party? I understand there's infighting according to the article, but it's unclear to me why one of the owners doesn't buy out the rest. Is there some general principle behind not selling to your competitors and choosing a party currently without a huge stake in television or movies like Yahoo? I'm curious about both reasons specific to this particular deal and gene…

It's all about licencing.

"In 2011, Hulu’s owners put the company up for sale and were looking for a bid of at least $2 billion; in exchange, they would offer content licenses that would run for two to three years."

"Last month, former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin submitted a starting bid of $500 million, with the understanding that he would be willing to pay more for extended licenses."

Basically, a huge chunk of Hulu's value is having a wide selection of content. At the same time the people doing the highest value licencing also own the content. Right now they can play an accounting game and lower the licencing costs to make it look profitable sell and then raise their licencing costs. Effectively it's the same money because they own the company as long as all the owners agree to a sweetheart deal. Unfortunately for them they are having some issue deciding just how much everyone should discount there content to make Hulu look better. However, nobody got suckered into there 2 billion dollar shell game.

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#52

Post by twoodfin »

jfb wrote: post #19
jcampbell1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The content deals they currently have in place are so one-sided that there little to be gained by owning Hulu. Their contracts are basically, you get a license to the content, but 95% of any revenues you generate must be given to the content partners. The whole point of Hulu was to stop piracy and return any cash generated to the content providers, not to be a profitable ongoing business. I don't even know what it me…

Yeah. Hulu is 100% a creature of the content owners. It's not a business. What would anybody be buying? The brand?

An "app" that's preinstalled or readily accessible on essentially every consumer device that does VoD? The number of those I can think of fits on one hand with a couple of fingers cut off.

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#53

Post by seanlinehan »

just2n wrote: post #44
marcamillion wrote: post #32

Wow....I feel like I am watching a brilliant game of chess. Marissa Mayer is increasingly showing her genius. It is clear that she understands that Yahoo is a New Media company. They serve assets to many eyeballs and monetize those assets. It seems that in her case, their main goal is grab up as much quality inventory as she can, and monetize the hell out of it. As their media inventory gets bigger, economies of scal…

It sounds to me like she's trying to build another Google. It's really (almost impossibly) hard to dethrone innovators without actually doing any innovation. It's equally difficult keeping talent when the corporate culture isn't hacker-centric. While buying your way into the party is a nice first step, what do you do when you don't have the talent pool to continue to innovate and can't even grow it? Especially when y…

In order to change the company's product trajectory, culture, and perception there are many stages that they must go through to get to the ultimate goal. At this point in time, Yahoo does not have the public perception that they are a cool company to work for, especially for engineers. This makes it a near impossible task to attract the talent necessary for internal innovation. However, if they buy cool companies, show that they are working on things internally (Flickr redesign), and prove that management is competent, they will be able to transition to internal innovation.

Of course, it is a big jump to go from buying companies to transforming their culture to match the perception that they are attempting to create. Perhaps removing the ability to work remotely was a bad first step, perhaps not. I imagine that Mayer knew what she was doing here and it will likely turn out to be a positive move. The big question is what other steps they take internally to truly change the culture. It could be a big flop, but if anybody knows a little something about company culture it would be Mayer.

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#54

Post by kenshiro_o »

Can someone tell me where Yahoo gets all this money from? It's not like they have pockets as deep as Facebook or Microsoft! Although I believe I do understand part of their strategy (having a foot in every type of medium), I have concerns about how they will integrate all this content and users into the Yahoo ecosystem. It is certainly not going to be easy work and the acquisition is the most straightforward bit. I really don't know what to think about this move. It seems a bit premature though.

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#55

Post by ipsin »

My two biggest complaints re: Hulu are

1) "web only" content licenses. Nevermind that they really mean "PC only", it's a confusing user experience to pay for a service and have content selectively unavailable. I think that this is mostly Fox's fault.

2) choppy ad serving. Video serves very consistently, but ads are prone to pausing, stuttering and other buggy behavior.

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#56

Post by anoncow »

untog wrote: post #48
marcamillion wrote: post #32

Wow....I feel like I am watching a brilliant game of chess. Marissa Mayer is increasingly showing her genius. It is clear that she understands that Yahoo is a New Media company. They serve assets to many eyeballs and monetize those assets. It seems that in her case, their main goal is grab up as much quality inventory as she can, and monetize the hell out of it. As their media inventory gets bigger, economies of scal…

Is "buy lots of big properties so you can advertise across all of them" really CEO genius ? It's something that Yahoo was doing for years before Meyer even came on board- they bought Flickr and Delicious, and tried to buy Facebook. Granted, none of those were hugely successful, but we're still yet to see whether Tumblr and (maybe) Hulu will be. I'm not sure that buying Hulu is such a slam-dunk, anyway. They are entir…

Not a ceo, but buying hulu looks like a good idea if they have the cash. Better than rolling out a new one from scratch. I would say simple business decisions may make a good businessperson.

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#57

Post by mortenjorck »

criley wrote: post #42
glhaynes wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sitting through the same 4 advertisements over-and-over-and-over again for What is it I don't understand about the online video business that causes this to happen? They can't get enough advertisements from their partners to allow them to be less repetitive? Advertisers don't want to provide variety? (Maybe advertisers specifically want the monotony? Surely not, else they'd follow the same scheme on network TV.) The…

Honestly, I'm just glad someone took that Gangnam Style pistachio commercial out back and shot it finally. I'm scared to even mention the commercial though, in fear that I will go home and be subjected to another 20-30 plays of it :(

On a tangent, that ad was such a terrible missed opportunity.

Here you have scored this exclusive deal with this impossible international crossover genius comedic rapper, and you sell a pretty delicious product, and all you can think of is a 1950s-style cutesy celebrity endorsement format. Ending with a very pre-Don-Draper, wink-and-a-fake-smile, generic-celebrity-worshipping closer "If Psy does it, we all go nuts."

I really liked Gangnam Style the first 30 times, and I enjoy Wonderful's pistachios, but this was perhaps the most unimaginative intersection of the two possible.

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#59

Post by samfisher83 »

salimmadjd wrote: post #49

Looks like Marisa is following the Google recipe. Blogs, Videos, Photos (improving flickr), now they just need a real mobile product and a social network.

60% of google's revenue comes from search. You can't be google without the golden hen and yahoo doesn't have search.

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#60

Post by hello_newman »

bernardom wrote: post #6

Holy cow. This is a big deal . There is no reason why TV networks need to exist the way they do. Hulu, Netflix and Amazon all produce original content and are perfectly positioned to disrupt them as their distribution volume increases. Even the current distribution channel is being disrupted by Aereo. Hulu is a a huge asset. If Yahoo gets in this game, they have a massive number of users, photos (flickr), blogposts (…

"What's the strategy behind all the acquisitions?"

I think yahoo finally got their shit together. Yahoo! has always been a surprisingly healthy company from a strict financial standpoint. They are a strong stock that a lot of blue-collar investors have loved; consistent, slightly innovative (enough to meet projections, but not too crazy that might have resulted in major losses [even though they have stumbled]) and they offer the basic pillars of a healthy tech company i.e. mail, search, content etc.

Yahoo has a nice amount of cash, and they are finally using it in a beneficial way, which is funny because it took someone from Google to realize that (remember yahoo trying to position itself as a "media" company).

I think the strategy is to do what you described above; be able to compete with the likes of Google and Amazon. They have mail, content, a social network (Tumblr and Flickr), healthy advertising etc and if they can pull off Hulu they would be able to have an end-to-end solution for users. I don't think they would buy Vimeo, from my perspective I couldn't see why that would be beneficial and IAC would probably want a hefty price for it.

If I was going long on a tech stock (say 36-60 months) I would put my money on Yahoo. I think Marissa Mayer is finally getting it right.

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