How Many Different Companies Can Bid on Hulu? Too Many

DirecTV and Time Warner Cable are the latest companies to throw their hat in the Hulu ring

What do Yahoo, Amazon, Time Warner Cable, DirecTV, the Chernin Group and Guggenheim Partners all have in common?

They all want to buy Hulu, according to a litany of different reports. TheWrap has written previously about Time Warner Cable and Chernin while the most recent report is about DirecTV, courtesy of Bloomberg

As fascinating as Hulu's future is to its viewers and almost everyone in the entertainment industry, almost all of these reports are premature (our own included). Hulu is on the block. That we know.

That's why the company has an interim CEO. It's why there are endless reports about suitors.

Yet each report on a new interested party has been highly speculative and lacked for detail. One exception, when AllThingsD reported about a sitdown between Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Hulu executives, was dubbed preliminary — by its author.

The few details that have leaked are numbers, and some of those numbers – like the $500 million Chernin supposedly offered – don't make a ton of sense.

Why? Because no one knows what is being sold. Friday’s Bloomberg post acknowledges as much.

"Discussions are at an early stage and it's uncertain if the company would want to buy all of Hulu or just a portion, said the people, who asked not to be identified because negotiations are private," Bloomberg’s Alex Sherman wrote.

Disney, News Corp. and Comcast each own one-third of the company. Comcast has no voting stake, as mandated by the Federal Communications Commission. Disney and News Corp. have very different visions of how the company should operate, which is just one reason they are exploring a sale.

Yet no one has reported definitively whether they are going to sell the whole company or one owner is going to divest its stake. Regardless of the buyer.

They could always keep it, which is what happened the last time Hulu was supposedly for sale.

Not that it's stopped anyone from speculating. 

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