No soup nazi for you, Google!

After letting just about every big tech titan on the block swing by to kick the tires on Hulu, the conglomerate of Comcast, Disney and News Corp. has decided the best move is to keep the old gal after all. Bidder's included heavyweight like Amazon and Google, who reports indicated was willing to pay a premium for the service. 

In the end, the sale revolved around how much content was being promised along with Hulu, at what price and for how long. Even in the midst of the negotiations for a sale, networks like Fox were pulling back the amount of programming that made its way from television one night to Hulu the next morning.

But the networks seem to have decided that even a billion dollar sale and hundreds of million in annual licensing fees was not enough to make up for the lack of control, and potential danger, that selling Hulu to Google or Amazon would entail. Undoubtedly Google would have wanted to bring Hulu's shows to YouTube and Amazon to their streaming service, Amazon Prime.

That would mean the networks would have two very big, savvy players in the digital ad market pushing their content on proprietary platforms. For an industry obsessed with keeping its programming locked down tight, and not upsetting its partners in the tradition television space, this might have been too much to swallow.

As Peter Kafka put it, "Because it’s the TV shows from those three companies that give Hulu almost all of its value. And while those shows have helped Hulu build a big Web business very quickly — Hulu has said it’s on track to generate $500 million in revenue this year — that’s not nearly as important to Hulu’s owners as their core TV business."

Birds of a feather...

Hulu users who don't pay for the site's premium version won't be enjoying any content from Fox the morning after. Starting today, all Fox shows will be kept off the web for eight days, unless users subscribe to Hulu Plus or prove they pay for Dish Network. Peter Kafka reports that Disney's ABC will be the next major network to put this kind of delay in place.

As Disney chief Bob Iger explained on a recent conference call, most of the network's revenue still comes from the cable companies, and keeping them happy means giving them exclusives the web doesn't have. Here's a transcript of Mr. Iger from Seeking Alpha:

The relationship that we have with the distributors is a very valuable one, and it’s one that we aim to respect by both protecting what we currently have and determining or figuring out ways that we can expand on it.

Our overall approach of late has been to make deals that increase revenue, while at the same time, protect and respect basically the multichannel or the channel distribution value that we see today. So, we’re looking at deals that are largely library in nature, meaning very little if any content that would be in season, mostly prior season. But also, trying to build into at least some of these deals, some form of authentication, [that] … will allow access to our programming faster or in a more aggressive window, if the customer is a multichannel subscriber.

You are right in your assessment that we’ll basically push the window back or make access to the programming more difficult or later, except if customers are authenticated as a subscriber.

Betabeat is of the opinion that the networks that opt to sacrifice some of the revenue from the incumbent cable players now, in exchange for establishing themselves as the fastest, most social, most viral presence on the web, will be the dominant players in five to ten years time. But maybe that's why we run a tech blog, and not a public company.

"Sorry if my beard tickles a little."

Poor Hulu. Born to a conglomerate of traditional TV networks that finally admitted they needed to do something about this whole, "web video" world, the company was always caught in a kind of Cronos paradox: the parents might kill their own child rather than let it grow up to threaten their power.

Recently the networks decided they would be better off selling Hulu to somebody else, making it easier down the road to reap lucrative fees for licensing the content they currently put on Hulu for free. But now it seems Fox has decided it can't even wait for that sale to go down before basically cutting Hulu off at the knees.

The News Corp. network has announced that starting August 15th it will no longer put shows on Hulu the day after they air. No more logging in the next morning to catch an episode of Family Guy or Glee. While nothing is set in stone yet, the well-informed Peter Kafka expects the other big networks to follow suit.

The caveat is that Hulu Plus users and people who can prove they pay for cable will get next day access. The rational behind this move is that the networks want to protect the billions of dollars they make in "retransmission" rights from the big cable providers. Having to share with the web the next day devalues the product in the eyes of the big cable companies. And digital ad dollars are peanuts compared to what traditional TV is kicking back to the networks.

The networks might argue that users who really want access to these shows will pay up for them, but as Mr. Kafka points out, it is now ridiculously easy to find pirated copies of most network programming on sites like Sidereel.com. And Sceper.eu. No wonder Hulu CEO Jason Kilar is so pissed off.