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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

This would basically amount to Google paying for Hulu to be shut down. Who would buy Hulu? We know that its backers - NBCU (Comcast/GE), Fox (News Corp), and Disney/ABC - are not making as nearly as much money off of it as they want to. As a result, if they sell it off they are unlikely to support their content being on there even with the fees, since the fees Hulu is able to generate are not adequate.

The only reason I can see that Google would be interested in Hulu would be because it competes with Youtube. Because as soon as Hulu loses its media backers it appears doomed to go straight into the ground.

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This could very well be true, but there are a couple different things that could happen as well. Google has had a lot of experience in the past several years monetizing YouTube much more effectively, so it's possible they could do a better job than Hulu does now at generating revenues.

Alternatively (and I think perhaps most likely), Google simply sees mainstream TV being available on the Internet as of tremendous strategic importance. They might be willing to take significant losses in operating it for that reason. They might even be willing to pay the extra fees to bake it into Google TV, which would immediately make that product far more compelling.

Agreed, but I sure hope if this happens that they keep the two / three ads per episode model. I feel like that's pretty fair. We get to watch good TV online, they get to show us a few ads. But if they go all Youtube and start inserting flash overlay banners I'll jump ship.

I really liked Hulu when it was two or three ads per episode. Now I get two ads at a time, and a 30 minute episode of The Simpsons contains 4-5 ad breaks. It bothers me more than just watching it on TV.

Edit: The House episode I'm watching has 6 ad breaks, each of those have 1 or 2 ads.

You make a good point. However we do not know what is happening in the negotiations.

This is what I would do if I were Google. I would say to the media companies, that I need license deals for at least one or two more years in order to buy Hulu. The media companies would probably give those in order to be able to book a nice profit on Hulu. Then during those one or two years, I would work to cut the media companies out. I.e., I would make deals directly with producers to bring new TV shows to Hulu before they even get on TV.

Every year there are dozens or maybe even hundreds of shows that get pitched to the TV companies and most of them get rejected. I am sure there are plenty of good ones among them. Google has enough money to pick up some of those shows and to keep Hulu interesting.

Hulu is valuable not only because of their content deals (which are about to expire) but because it has trained millions of people to go there to watch TV. Google can take advantage of this and swoop in and cut out the middle man by making deals directly with the content producers. This is somewhat similar to what CD baby did for music.

Then after the shows run on Hulu they can be sold to networks to on television with the statistics behind each show that they are popular.

This is probably doubiely true because tv networks have much more limited air time, something that doesn't apply to hulu in he same way (and with almost certainly not apply to hulu running on google's equipment)

Way off base. Google is aiming to be a dominant player in the web TV space and compete directly with Comcast, Time Warner, etc.

They have had trouble securing content deals with the big networks. Hulu would be their Trojan Horse to get premium content onto the Google TV platform.

I'm not saying their strategy will work, or that the networks would approve them as a bidder, but they are clearly not aiming to run Hulu into the ground.

http://www.betabeat.com/2011/07/01/hulu-could-be-googles-tro...

The question is whether they would be able to hang onto the content, at a reasonable rate. Remember, Hulu is not a startup it is owned by the content distributors themselves. For sure Google will be charged more than the guys are charging themselves right now. And even now Hulu isn't making a very good ROI.

I'm not rooting against Google, if they can integrate it with their other offerings in a way that adds value, more power to them.

Seeing as how they are having troubles getting other content producers to sign up (Google Books and Google Music as examples) to Google media projects, the odds of them pushing through with TV and movie organizations seems even slimmer.

I don't think Google speaks "content", especially when they are or would be negotiating with organizations that have a strong interest in capping bandwidth or double dipping fees from organizations like Google. TimeWarner (and Comcast, even though you can't vote doesn't mean you can't lobby. . privately) I'm looking at you. I think the Google books lawsuit fiasco really damaged Google's reputation with the content creation community (and the AA organizations) which in turn would negatively impact their negotiations with content providers.

Also, Google can, and probably will be seen as an all out competitor to traditional business models. They're building GoogleTV to destroy set top boxes and push people away from traditional media access and onto the net and copyrighted material still floods youtube. From a negotiating perspective, Google would have to make an extremely sweet offer to content creators to get them to think about putting content on the mashup Hulutube / YouHulu site. (I personally think YouHulu sounds better).

I dunno, I actually see this complementing and strengthening YouTube. Assuming Google can keep the content, it would make YouTube the place to go for both funny videos and network TV.

Google has been working for a while to get more "programming" on YouTube an this would be one hell of a way to accomplish that goal.

I'm pretty sure the content guys want there to be more competition in the channel-delivery space... even with acquisition, I think Hulu will survive as it exists, if not get better.

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