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>Hulu is one of the crown jewels here.

Maybe for Comcast, but I doubt it is for Disney. Disney already purchased BAMTech which handles streaming for MLB, HBO, ESPN, League Of Legends, and many others. They have been working towards using that technology for a Disney streaming service that will debut sometime in 2019. That company is already closing in on Hulu in terms of value and would make integrating Hulu's tech and employees difficult. The only real value Hulu gives Disney is contracts for content, but those contract are only temporary and good content is still the core competency of Disney. It wouldn't surprise me if Disney proposed the original deal with the expectation that they would need to sell off Hulu to a competitor in order to get the political capital for approval for the rest of the deal.

Hearsay, but...

I’ve heard that last year Disney blocked an attempt from Apple to buy Hulu, which suggests that it is still pretty important to them

Which would still fit in with my theory that they plan to sacrifice it to secure the rest of the sale. They won't get any political capital for selling Hulu until it comes up in negotiations with regulators.

I’m curious, how would they go about blocking it?

Disney Owns 30% of Hulu today, Fox owns 30% and Comcast owns 30%

If either Disney or Comcast buys Fox will become 60% owner, however being a 30% owner is likely enough power to have enough influence to block a sale to Apple..

Hulu’s major selling point is it’s distribution of network shows - but that’s mostly in the US. For a global company like Apple, it’s not as valuable.

Even further hearsay, but rumors also exist that Disney still hasn't announced the name/brand of their streaming service yet, despite supposed to launch early next year, in the off chance that they have the opportunity (controlled Hulu) to just use the existing Hulu brand and leverage existing brand awareness/loyalty.

FWIW: "... 60% of peak download traffic on fixed access networks in North America was accounted for by four VOD services: Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Video and Hulu."

from https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/the-end-of-video-coding-...

That's misleading Netflix has more than 10x the traffic Hulu gets. Hulu's under 3% of peak viewing traffic and relatively small by comparison to the others.

> Disney lawyers will probably find some event to use to justify yanking the Marvel rights from Comcast if this deal goes through.

Probably not that hard; licensing deals very often have change of ownership clauses exactly to prevent someone purchasing the licenses to get the license without the licensor having a say.

The Marvel contract has proven remarkably difficult to deal with, and there are empires that have been funded in Florida as disney tries to find a way to undo it.

Quite possibly the most interesting comment in this thread but no details. I'd much rather hear about the incredible hoops Disney may be jumping through to make all this work. I've always been fascinated by Disney's vast array of businesses spawned in Florida to take care of their interests. Really wish you'd have shared more insight if you have any.

Excuses my ignorance.... Why Florida?

Disney wants to open up Marvel themed parks (gates)both at Disney Land and at Disney World. Disney Land (in California) is severely space restricted, so it may end up only being a "land" (or subsection) of the existing California adventures park. In orlando they have plenty of space, but the contract for Universal (who is owned by Comcast) keeps disney from using a ton of marvel IP.

Universal Studios owns a contract to Marvel that basically disallows Disney to do any Marvel COMIC shows or rides because their parks are just close enough (within 100 miles or something) to Universals parks to be part of the clause. Disney cannot cancel the contract in order for Disney to buy it out it has to be negotiated under Universals terms as well. I have a relative that works at Universal Studios who explained this to me. The only thing Disney can do is new marvel characters probably and stuff based off Marvel movies.

I don't think the contract has an expiration date either... Marvel wasn't doing too good back in the day you could say.

It's actually worse then that.

So, there is not only a master contract in place. there are subcontracts for every single character and IP that is in Orlando, with different scopes associated with each. One of the reasons Disney went so heavily with Guardians of the Galaxy, is because they believed that Orlando could use these characters, as they were new characters. Disney also thought they could get away with doing some advertisements on the monorails. Universal objected, in court.

At this point, Disney is looking to figure out what they can and can not do. The fact that they are going to be building a guardians coaster at Epcot means they think they are fairly sure of that particular thing, no matter what universal (comcast) may threaten them with.

On the other hand, the rumored Wakanda stuff makes everything much more dicey.

I'm told that Disney was very comfortable that they had the ability to get all of the rights when they bought marvel. I'm told that they are much less sure of that now.

My guess is that Fox may eventually get sold for pieces. Disney's 30% stake of hulu, plus the marvel rights and Avatar are just too important for Disney not utilize their most powerful death start - their lobbyists.

Just when I thought I knew a good chunk of it, I find out I knew even less. That is crazy.

I'm always amazed when a person has the knowledge to make these types of comments. Kudos

Comcast just wants to be hated more by consumers... I mean Disney owns Marvel and as fan they need to control/movie rights to X-men, Deadpool, etc. I’d love to see a Wolverine vs. Hulk type of movie.

It's entirely possible that we're at peak superhero and/or Marvel superhero. But, sadly, probably not given that it's the sort of thing that works well in international markets.

There's an overabundance of super hero movies, but I'm not sure they'll ever go away, unlike Westerns. There's waaay too much source material, and waaaay too varied for it to not become a constant genre. And since now we actually have the special effects to present things properly, the draw will always be there.

Have westerns gone away? I recently started Netflix, and there seems to be an enormous number of TV series and second-tier new movies that are western-themed available there.

This is no doubt Netflix in the US? Internationally, I've not picked up such a trend.

Westworld (HBO) isn't a Western per se but it is a Western setting (exclusively so in S1). Godless. Longmire. It's definitely not the staple that it was at one time in the US but it's certainly not extinct.

Which is what I meant by my upthread comment. I don't expect or wish superhero movies to go extinct. I'm sure they won't as they have antecedents that are literally ancient. (Greek, at least, mythology.) I just wish there wan't such a glut of them and that they didn't tend to incorporate so many of the annoying features of typical modern action movies.

I read that, as part of this latest bid, Comcast would be covering the breakup fee owed to Disney.