Hulu is in Apple’s sights: its acquisition would mean a decisive boost for the Apple brand’s on-demand TV projects.
Apple TV could soon become a reality: apparently the Cupertino company is strongly pushing towards opening negotiations with Hulu, a platform well-known in the United States.
Hulu specifically broadcasts TV series and movies on demand daily, legally and, importantly, for free for most of its rich web-based offering. Hours and hours of television entertainment in exchange for some advertising and a few limits: for example, you cannot watch more than five episodes of a TV series per week. A limit easily overcome by purchasing a subscription for about $8, a more than reasonable price.
This way, Hulu allows millions of people to watch TV programs and series directly from their PC screen, simply by having internet access.
Apple, which has been working for some time to expand the iTunes catalog to include on-demand movies and TV, thus seems to have cast its line towards Hulu, participating in the auction for its acquisition.
Apple would not be the only contender: the first giant to reportedly emerge was Yahoo!, and apparently Google is also at the negotiating table.
The only company that has explicitly stated it is no longer interested in acquiring Hulu is Microsoft.
Even Amazon, according to industry analysts, could have some interest in entering the auction vortex, although at the moment the two strongest contenders seem to be only Yahoo! and Apple.
We are still in the realm of probabilities and hypotheses: let’s not forget that the last major acquisition we covered – Skype in Microsoft’s hands – surprised everyone quite a bit, as there was absolute discretion from Redmond regarding the negotiations, and then it was actually Microsoft that emerged favorably, compared to the more exposed Google and Facebook.
It’s not impossible that, even for Hulu, there could be some big surprise on the horizon.
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