Thursday the owners of Hulu made the decision to remove their company from the auction block. The announcement by Walt Disney, News Corp., Comcast, and equity firm Providence Equity Partners ends months of speculation about who would buy Hulu and for how much.
The speculation around the sale of Hulu started back in June when Yahoo reportedly offered $2 billion to buy the company. Yahoo wanted four or five years of exclusive access to current TV shows and older movies out of the deal. Hulu owners weren't willing to give that long a period of exclusivity reportedly offering Yahoo five years of total access but only two exclusive years. Yahoo wasn't interested in that kind of deal and withdrew their offer.
After that Hulu hired investment banks to help them sort through offers from other companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, Dish Network, and even Microsoft. Recent reports indicated that Microsoft had dropped out of the running but the other companies were still interested. The largest problem with the sale of Hulu is that many of the owners weren't willing to put their content out there on the web. Fox Networks started delaying access to episodes of popular shows online specifically to drive people to ingest more content via their TV and cable providers.
Hulu owners discussed removing Hulu from the auction block in a statement.
