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Yahoo approaches Hulu about possible acquisition

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Re: Yahoo approaches Hulu about possible acquisition

#13

Post by zaidf »

Is Hulu even an acquisition target at any reasonable price? I always felt the media co backers of Hulu(Viacom, Time Warner etc.) want to keep it independent and use it more to progress their corporate cause than make a return by selling Hulu.

I'd put Hulu as one of the least likely companies to be acquired.

Re: Yahoo approaches Hulu about possible acquisition

#15

Post by billturner »

This is really quite sad. In 1999, Yahoo bought the streaming media company (not just video, but radio/sports/original content/etc) I worked for, broadcast.com. They then proceeded to slowly drive the property into the ground, to where now, there's so little of it left it's pathetic.

If they had really grasped on to what we were doing back then, and ran with it, Yahoo would have come out ahead of YouTube, Google Video, and, I could imagine, many of the current streaming radio players out there now (lastfm, rdio, etc).

But that didn't happen. They silently killed off what they spent so much on to buy.

Re: Yahoo approaches Hulu about possible acquisition

#16

Post by AllenKids »

nextparadigms wrote: post #3

Does anyone else think Hulu would be a good acquisition for Google, especially now that they have Google TV? It would've been better if they bought Netflix a while ago, but Hulu seems to be like the next best thing. Plus, it's based on ads and everything.

The second Google purchases Hulu, the site's content licenses will be revoked by All the providers and they'll demand a renegotiation of far more favorible deal.

Hulu was only able to stay afloat because it was backed by FOX NBC and Disney, and got all those shows at a heavily discounted price. The networks were very cautious to not create an iTunes for TV that would grow to be too big to control, they use very restrictive and short term content license to ensure that.

Re: Yahoo approaches Hulu about possible acquisition

#18

Post by burke »

billturner wrote: post #15

This is really quite sad. In 1999, Yahoo bought the streaming media company (not just video, but radio/sports/original content/etc) I worked for, broadcast.com. They then proceeded to slowly drive the property into the ground, to where now, there's so little of it left it's pathetic. If they had really grasped on to what we were doing back then, and ran with it, Yahoo would have come out ahead of YouTube, Google Vide…

This really seems like a theme for Yahoo!. Delicious comes to mind as another example.

Re: Yahoo approaches Hulu about possible acquisition

#19

Post by staunch »

billturner wrote: post #15

This is really quite sad. In 1999, Yahoo bought the streaming media company (not just video, but radio/sports/original content/etc) I worked for, broadcast.com. They then proceeded to slowly drive the property into the ground, to where now, there's so little of it left it's pathetic. If they had really grasped on to what we were doing back then, and ran with it, Yahoo would have come out ahead of YouTube, Google Vide…

No, they would not have. Nothing Broadcast.com did offered any advantage in creating something like YouTube.

Broadcast.com was almost 10 years ahead of its time and probably would not have survived on its own. Yahoo made one of the worst acquisitions in history and then did the smart thing by cutting their losses.

Until around 2005 (when Flash Player 7 implemented progressive streaming) there was no good way to stream video on the internet and not enough users with broadband to build a big business around it.

YouTube was created at exactly the right moment, by a startup, which is how it would have happened regardless of what Yahoo did.

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