Hulu is looking at selling a stake to Time Warner Inc., owner of Warner Bros. Television and HBO, that would make the company an equal partner in the streaming video service with current owners Walt Disney Co., 21st Century Fox and Comcast Corp., said the Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
Such a deal would require each of the current stakeholders to drop their investments in the service down to 25% each, the Journal reported, noting that talks were not advanced.
Hulu has gotten increasingly aggressive, investing hundreds of millions in original and acquired programming, including Sony Pictures Television’s Seinfeld and NBCUniversal’s The Mindy Project. A deal with Time Warner would infuse the service with cash as it seeks to compete with other leading subscription video on demand (SVOD) providers Netflix and Amazon as well as upstarts.
Two years ago, Hulu was seeking a buyer but nothing panned out. Since then, the stakeholders have injected $750 million into the service. In the past year, Hulu has increased its spending on content to $1.5 billion, up from $600 million in 2014, according to Nomura Securities.
Read more: The Wall Street Journal
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