Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

allthingsd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 173 posts

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#71

Post by dakrisht »

smacktoward wrote: post #61
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 is clear that she understands that Yahoo is a New Media company. They serve assets to many eyeballs and monetize those assets. That is pretty much the exact same thing as Terry Semel's vision for Yahoo was. Remember him?

Wonder what Jerry Yang has to say about all of this

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#72

Post by bad_user »

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…

> what do you do when you don't have the talent pool to continue to innovate and can't even grow it?

I'm sure Yahoo still has a big talent pool. Don't really know how they managed to do it as it doesn't really make sense, however if you want some proof of that, take a look at: http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html (speaking of which, did you know that Apache Hadoop was initiated and is still led by Yahoo?)

> So far Yahoo's response has been "buy them and let them operate independently."

Actually that wasn't Yahoo's behaviour in the past. Delicious for example stagnated after they began rewriting/redesigning it, as they wanted Delicious to be "integrated" with Yahoo's network. Development eventually grinned to a halt. If Yahoo would have kept Flickr or Delicious operating independently, then both would be a lot bigger than they are today.

Yahoo also did a stupid move when they sold Delicious. But at the very least they sold it, instead of shutting it down, like Google did with Reader.

> People go to work at Google to work at Google, not to work at a subsidiary of Google.

Well, no, you're talking about the poor fools that go through that awful interview process without caring about what they'll end-up working on, being assigned on Calendar, or on fixing bugs of internal tools, or on some project destined for some African country that nobody will ever hear about, or on some other soul-sucking activity with the only thing to show for being a Google T-shirt.

Google is still a good brand among employers and it's still something to be able to say that you're working at Google, however, like all other big software companies, Google got too big and those with a minimal internal knowledge of how things work there know for a fact that it really isn't the glamorous place to work at, unless you're lucky.

> Yahoo hasn't been an engineer's company for a very, very long time, and I don't see them taking strides to fix that

I can't possibly imagine how in the world would you know that, unless you worked for them. Well did you?

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#73

Post by kbenson »

legitsource wrote: post #47
yoster wrote: post #24

I tried Hulu multiple times with their free month offers. It sucked so bad that I canceled before I had to pay for a subscription. I'm sure people love Hulu, but I am definitely not one of them.

It burns me to pay a subscription and still have to watch advertisements. It burns me even more that the ads are so repetitive.

How is that any different than cable/satellite?

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#74

Post by camus »

anoncow wrote: post #56
untog wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You cant roll out a Hulu from scratch. It is basically a venture between content providers. How much TV content does Yahoo produce ? none. It is a huge mistake to buy Hulu. I dont know how much they'll be paying for this but it is worth 0 money, just like Tumblr.

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#75

Post by jimbobimbo »

criley wrote: post #39
aluhut wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

House of Cards is great though.

Yep, I love Netflix and loved every second of House of Cards! Although I have the opposite issue with Netflix. Lack of constantly added content makes their library feel stale at times, while every time I hit hulu.com it pops up with a list of shows with a "NEW EPISODE!" badge. Keeps you going back!

Two words: back catalog. My Netflix queue doesn't go shorter, no matter how I try (both DVD and streaming). Sometimes I feel like a kind in a candy store, when drilling down their recommendations.

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#76

Post by jarjoura »

Yahoo is trying to acquire so many companies, I fear they are only going to run into culture problems as they begin to assimilate them into the parent company over time.

Just look at AOL as the model company that did this in the late 90s and early 2000s. They broke so many companies they acquired and it only hurt AOL.

Google and Facebook have been successful at it because they essentially used it as a way to hire smart people who wouldn't have interviewed with them.

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#79

Post by pvnick »

FuzzyDunlop wrote: post #35
pvnick wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but it was blocked by the french governement Governments screw everything up

They were probably right on the money considering Yahoo's reputation.

I would say we're already screwed if we're allowing governments to get in situations where they "consider Yahoo's reputation."

That's none of their damn business.

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#80

Post by e1ven »

kenshiro_o wrote: post #54

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 r…

Back in the day, they bought 40% of Alibaba, which has done VERY well. Selling back this stake has raised a lot of money.
Post reply on HN