TVloop Blog

The big story in online video today is obviously the Hulu-Disney partnership that has been rumored for the past month.  When the deal nets out, all three media companies involved - Disney, Fox, and NBC - will each own 27% of Hulu.

While I haven’t seen any specific dates on when the Disney content will be added to Hulu, I have to agree with TechCrunch that the company that should be most worried about this deal is Google/YouTube.  While Hulu is unlikely to ever catch YouTube because of all of the user-generated content YouTube streams, Hulu has much more monetization potential by carrying programming from three of the top four broadcasters.

Another big question that is unlikely to have an answer in the near future is whether or not CBS will now be feeling the heat to do a Hulu deal of it’s own.  The network has always maintained that it would always be willing to talk about content distribution, it really had no interest in joining the other networks on Hulu.  This strategy seemed to be further strengthened by the relaunch of TV.com a few months ago.  PaidContent theorizes that there could end up being some sort of arrangement where Hulu agrees to have it’s content streamed on TV.com if CBS adds it’s programming to Hulu.  That could be an interesting deal, but one that is unlikely to come to fruition at any time in the near future.

From a Watercooler perspective, our biggest question is how to treat the programming we currently get from ABC.  We’re one of the few third parties that are able to launch the ABC player directly from our communities, but the Hulu flash player is a much better user experience (sorry ABC).  ABC requires the download of the Move Networks player which can be a hassle for some users.  So from that perspective it would definitely be in our best interest to migrate to Hulu for 100% of ABC content.