{"id":2140,"date":"2011-07-22T13:33:56","date_gmt":"2011-07-22T18:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcitement.com\/?p=2140"},"modified":"2011-07-28T09:15:42","modified_gmt":"2011-07-28T14:15:42","slug":"apple-rumored-to-bid-on-hulu-film-at-11-but-only-on-hulu-plus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/hardware\/apple-rumored-to-bid-on-hulu-film-at-11-but-only-on-hulu-plus\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple Rumored To Bid On Hulu, Film At 11 (But Only On Hulu Plus)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>According to Bloomberg<\/a>, two contacts with knowledge of the upcoming auction claim Apple is preparing to make a bid for Hulu’s online video service.\u00a0 Other interested parties are reported to include AT&T, Yahoo, and Google, with Microsoft having already dropped out of the bidding.\u00a0 Considering Apple’s struggle to turn the AppleTV into a mainstream product, this acquisition would seem to make sense on that front.\u00a0 If the Business Insider<\/a> website is correct in their claims about Yahoo’s bid for Hulu, it included a guarantee of four to five years of exclusive content rights to current TV shows and older movies.\u00a0 If Apple obtained something similar, they would be in a good position to make the AppleTV the only Hulu compatible device on the market and therefore, make it the hardware required to view said content.\u00a0 Alternately, Apple might opt to include Hulu subscription services as another possible iTunes store purchase, broadening their portfolio of streaming media options.<\/p>\n

With the reported value of Hulu set at around $2 billion before the auction even began, it won’t be a cheap purchase. But it’s well within Apple’s grasp, given their stash of over $76 billion in cash and securities.\u00a0 Another consideration is the fact that Hulu is partially owned by the Walt Disney Company, which has Apple CEO Steve Jobs as its single largest shareholder.<\/p>\n

On the flip-side?\u00a0 John Gruber of Daring Fireball<\/a> points out that Hulu is designed around Adobe Flash technology, which is not exactly something Apple wants to add to their product portfolio.\u00a0 HTML 5\u00a0 doesn’t yet support digital rights management, so conversion to that standard isn’t even an option right now.\u00a0 There’s also the problem of existing licensing.\u00a0 Some of the programming on Hulu Plus is only licensed for viewing on a PC, so that means Apple would be paying billions for a bundle containing some content with usage limitations.<\/p>\n

Until further notice, it’s still anyone’s guess.\u00a0 Anyone feel like placing bets?\u00a0 Double payback if you’re also betting on a name-change to iHulu!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to Bloomberg, two contacts with knowledge of the upcoming auction claim Apple is preparing to make a bid for Hulu’s online video service.\u00a0 Other interested parties are reported to include AT&T, Yahoo, and Google, with Microsoft having already dropped out of the bidding.\u00a0 Considering Apple’s struggle to turn the AppleTV into a mainstream product, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,31,47],"tags":[621,114,435,620],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2140"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2376,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140\/revisions\/2376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}