On Thursday, Hulu, the popular streaming TV show and movie company, announced that it has taken the "For Sale" site off its virtual front yard. In a statement, Hulu"s owners said it had "terminated the sale process and look forward to working together to continue mapping out its path to even greater success." But now new rumors claim that Google might still be able to purchase Hulu.
The Business Insider reports, via unnamed sources, that despite what Hulu"s official statement said on Thursday, Google"s bid " ... is not off the table." The company reportedly offered as much as $4 billion to purchase Hulu. However, unlike the other offers made by companies like Yahoo, Amazon and DirecTV, Google asked for additional considerations from Hulu. One of them was extended exclusive rights to Hulu"s many TV shows from ABC, NBC and Fox. Hulu reportedly only offered its bidders two years of exclusive rights to those shows as part of its sale offer.
According to the unnamed source, "What [Hulu"s owners] decided was that [they should] stop the process and settle down and deal with everyone"s expectations [for liquidity]. If there were further discussions [with Google] then we would subsequently engage in that. It wouldn"t be an auction or whatever."
Hulu recently announced that its premium Hulu Plus service has now exceeded 1 million subscribers less than a year after it launched. While the service still gets a lot of revenue from running ads in the videos, Hulu expects that money from the Hulu Plus subscriptions will generate the majority of the company"s revenues in less than 12 months.