Serving as a massive boon to those of us occasionally come under professional obligation to answer the question, “Hey, who owns Hulu?”, Disney announced today that it’s about to spend a bit more than $8.6 billion to make the answer “Us, and us alone, at last.” The company will be paying said billions to Comcast/NBCUniversal, which has long owned a third of the company, which has led to a series of bickerings over the years with Disney about who was going to buy the other chunk, and when.
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Historical sidebar time! This rather odd arrangement came about because Hulu was originally devised, back ‘round 2007, as a multi-company attempt to break into the streaming market charted by Netflix, without anyone having to go nuts and, say, have every major studio just build their own streaming network from scratch and then make them all compete in a horribly fractured online media landscape. (Whoops!) Originally chartered by Comcast and Fox, the service eventually got buy-in from most of the big TV makers—and then, when Disney bought most of Fox’s assets in 2019, the company ended up having a 66 percent stake in the whole project, essentially putting it in charge of the whole shebang.
In the subsequent years, Disney has struggled, on occasion, with the very good question of why the hell it owns two fully functioning, essentially separate streaming services, making several pushes to tie Hulu and its subscriber base more tightly to its own native Disney+. That’ll probably only accelerate now that it’s finally moving forward with buying out Comcast’s share, so expect those “Bundle your Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions together!” offers to start getting more aggressive, bordering on threatening, over the next year or so.
The sale (and, more importantly, the sale price) are still subject to an appraisal of Hulu’s actual value; Comcast will almost certainly try to argue that Hulu is valuable enough to be worth a bit more than that $8.6 billion for a third-share, which is based off of a floor value for the service that the two companies agreed to back in 2019. The sale will likely moved forward some time in 2024.