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Comment by jcampbell1 | Hacker News Reader

The content deals they currently have in place are so one-sided that there little to be gained by owning Hulu. Their contracts are basically, you get a license to the content, but 95% of any revenues you generate must be given to the content partners.

The whole point of Hulu was to stop piracy and return any cash generated to the content providers, not to be a profitable ongoing business. I don't even know what it means to buy a company that must funnel all revenues to content providers. It seems like Yahoo is bidding on something they won't actually control.

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Yeah. Hulu is 100% a creature of the content owners. It's not a business. What would anybody be buying? The brand?

Presumably the users.

The advertising stream? I've never seen Hulu but there would be a lot of chances to show ads on it I'd imagine.

And yahoo is a company with alot of add inventory!

Of course, the whole point is that most of the revenue from the ads goes to the content providers, not to Hulu.

Still, you can imagine a scenario where Yahoo signs an ad deal with say General Motors for an overall package for all their properties, and then throws in Hulu as a bonus.

Keep the ad rates at Hulu at whatever minimum is written into the content deals, but use that as a bonus/loss leader for the real money that's allocated to advertising on the other Yahoo properties.

Might work.

An "app" that's preinstalled or readily accessible on essentially every consumer device that does VoD? The number of those I can think of fits on one hand with a couple of fingers cut off.

> What would anybody be buying? The brand?

And a viable competitor to YouTube's new paid subscription service. UGC was the big thing in video since YouTube launched, but the real revenue generator could be paid subscriptions, and that market is wide-open. Hulu doesn't -have- to be big studios.

Maybe they want to own it so they can get exclusive control over the ads. The platform really allows many of the kinds of ad revenues Youtube can generate, so could be a sweet deal for both content owners and Yahoo.

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