Yahoo’s apparently on a roll. Under Ceo Marissa Mayer’s guidance, the struggling search giant has been making it rain to the tune of billions. It seems Mayer’s strategy is to use Yahoo’s still formidable war chest to buy up the things it lacks. It was recently announced that Yahoo would acquire short form blogging platform, Tumblr for a cool $1.1 billion. Now All Things D reports that Yahoo has submitted a bid for streaming service, Hulu.
This move could signal an attempt to compete with Google’s YouTube juggernaut. Yahoo would love to get a piece of the streaming pie, especially with the growing number of folks streaming content to mobile devices. But Hulu’s a very different beast. While YouTube’s moved into more licensed (and even paid) content, it’s still dominated by user-created videos. Hulu, on the other hand, serves up Hollywood produced goodness, mostly TV shows but a growing selection of movies as well.
Even if Yahoo owned the rights to Hulu, it would still have to license all the content from the service’s current owners, News Corp., Disney and Comcast. The 3 media titans put Hulu up for sale back in 2011, offering content licenses for 2 to 3 years and asking $2 billion. However they retracted their offering after a few months.
Yahoo’s bidding against several other companies, including DirecTV, Time Warner Cable, William Morris Endeavor, and Guggenheim Digital. So, don’t expect to see a “YaHulu” app just yet.
[Via: All Things D]