Hulu sale looks imminent

Jeremy Hobson: Today Hulu goes up for sale. That’s the website where you can watch TV shows on demand. The current owners include media giants like News Corporation and Disney.

But as Marketplace’s Jeff Tyler reports, finding a new owner may not be so simple.

Jeff Tyler: Hulu has a strong brand name. It carries a lot more TV shows than rival YouTube. And it has another thing going for it:

Commercial: The new Stella Artois ‘Chalice’ can.

Rob Enderle: You really can’t fast-forward through the commercials for Hulu.

Analyst Rob Enderle follows the tech industry. He says Yahoo or Microsoft could be interested buyers. But Enderle says Hulu’s main problem is that it doesn’t own the shows it broadcasts.

Enderle: The difficulty is determining what the value is since they don’t own the context, or really control it that much.

News Corp and Disney figure they can cut out the middleman and show their TV shows on their own websites.

Enderle: The folks that own the content seem to want to go directly to the consumer and capture all the revenue for it.

If Hulu can’t find a media company to buy it, Enderle says it may need to evolve into its own network, perhaps creating programs just for the Internet.

I’m Jeff Tyler for Marketplace.