The TV and movie video web site Hulu has reportedly received an unexpected offer to acquire the company. Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, the company's board of directors are thinking about possibly putting Hulu up for sale. While The Wall Street Journal article didn't mention which company generated the unexpected buy out offer, another article at The Los Angeles Times has named Yahoo as the possible buyer, according to unnamed sources. The original Wall Street Journal story stated that the company's directors are unsure of what they might do and may yet decide not to put up Hulu for sale after all. Officially the company had no comment on these news stories.
Launched in March 2008, Hulu is a massive joint video venture between NBCUniversal, Disney-ABC and Fox Entertainment Group. The Hulu web site offers up streaming video of recent and older TV episodes in full with "commercials" for free along with a small number of feature films. It also has a subscription-based service called Hulu Plus that gives its users access to even more TV shows and movies. However even Hulu Plus users have to deal with commercials while watching their videos. This differs from the much more popular Netflix subscription service which offers streaming video of TV shows and movies with no commercials. Hulu Plus subscribers can also access the videos via other devices such as the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 game consoles, Apple's iOS-based devices, a number of Blu-Ray players and other set-top boxes.
13 Comments - Add comment