{"id":42856,"date":"2019-05-14T15:51:09","date_gmt":"2019-05-14T19:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=42856"},"modified":"2019-05-14T15:51:24","modified_gmt":"2019-05-14T19:51:24","slug":"disney-is-taking-full-control-of-hulu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2019\/05\/disney-is-taking-full-control-of-hulu\/","title":{"rendered":"Disney is taking full control of Hulu"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Disney’s takeover of Hulu is just about complete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Comcast on Tuesday agreed to sell its ownership stake\nin the streaming video service to Disney. The sale won’t happen for\nat least another five years, but Disney will take full operational control of\nHulu right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The deal is a sign of how much streaming video has changed\nin the last few years. Hulu was at one time a joint venture between several\nmedia titans: Disney (DIS), 21st Century Fox, Comcast’s NBCUniversal\nand Time Warner (now WarnerMedia). None of those companies had majority\ncontrol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now Hulu is effectively a Disney product. The company became\nthe majority stakeholder in the streaming video service after it closed a deal\nfor most of Fox’s assets in March. Last month, WarnerMedia \u2014 now owned\nby AT&T (T) \u2014 agreed to sell its 9.5% interest back\nto Hulu. (CNN is a division of WarnerMedia.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Comcast (CMCSA) owns roughly a third of Hulu.\nUnder the terms of the deal, Comcast will sell its interest to Disney for\nHulu’s fair market value no earlier than 2024. Disney has guaranteed that the\nsale price will reflect a minimum total equity value of $27.5 billion for Hulu\nat that time, according to a press release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Hulu represents the best of television,” Disney\nCEO Bob Iger said in a statement, adding that the company is now able to\n“completely integrate” Hulu into its streaming plans in a way that\nmakes the service “even more compelling and a greater value for\nconsumers.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Disney has already made clear that Hulu will be a critical\npart of its streaming strategy. When the company debuted its Disney+ service to\ninvestors last month, it also spoke at length about the future of Hulu, which\nhas more adult programming, like “The Handmaid’s Tale.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Disney executives talked about potentially bundling its\nservices together for a discounted price. They also said they want all of their\nservices, including Hulu, to reach profitability within the next several years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Hulu is the third leg of Disney’s streaming\nstrategy,” said Trip Miller, a Disney shareholder and managing partner at\nGullane Capital Partners. “Six months ago, you had four owners to the\nbusiness and it was very complicated and confusing \u2014 so this brings about a lot\nof clarity and control of direction for Disney.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right now, Hulu has roughly 27 million paid subscribers on\nits service. It still lags far beyond chief competitor Netflix, which has nearly\n150 million subscribers globally, 60 million of whom are from the United\nStates. Hulu is only available in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Hulu is beefing up its original content offerings.\nEarlier this month, the streaming service showed off a slate of upcoming\nprograms, including “The Dropout,” a limited series about rise and\nfall of Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes. It’s also working on two new live-action\nMarvel series, “Ghost Rider” and “Helstrom.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hulu is going to need more programming as it prepares to\neventually part ways with NBC content. Right now, Hulu carries a lot of NBC\nshows, including “Saturday Night Live,” “The Voice” and\n“The Good Place.” Comcast has agreed with Hulu to extend the\nservice’s license of NBCUniversal content through late 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NBCUniversal can end most of its agreements with Hulu in\nthree years. One year from now, NBC will have the right to carry some of the\ncontent it licenses to Hulu on its own streaming service, in return for\nreducing the fees Hulu pays to host that content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“As Disney continues to grow their subscriber base,\nretaining Comcast\/NBC Universal content is important,” Miller said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s not a surprise that NBCUniversal would want to reserve\nsome of its content for its own streaming service, which it said earlier this\nyear would launch in 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Several of the major media companies are pulling content\nfrom other streaming platforms so they can bulk up their own offerings. For\nexample, Disney took a bunch of its shows and movies off of Netflix in\npreparation for the debut of the streaming service Disney+ later this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WarnerMedia and Netflix, meanwhile, reached an\nagreement to keep “Friends” on Netflix this year, but\nWarnerMedia reserved the right to put that show on its own forthcoming\nstreaming service, if it wants. And AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson reportedly\nsaid at a media conference in Boston on Tuesday that the company is going\nto pull the content it has licensed elsewhere and “bring that back into\nthe fold.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Disney’s takeover of Hulu is just about complete. Comcast on Tuesday agreed to sell its ownership stake in the streaming video service to Disney. The sale won’t happen for at least another… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":42857,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[128],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42856"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42856\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}