UPDATED 10:43 EDT / JULY 07 2011

Hulu Definitely for Sale, says Disney CEO

Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger said that owners of Hulu are “committed to selling [the company].”  Hulu’s board has been in talks about a possible buy out over the past few weeks, and finally, at the Allen & Co. media conference in Idaho, Iger said that the selling transaction will happen soon. He didn’t specify when though.

Hulu is among the very few to offer on-demand TV and movies over the internet, and a competitive offering for that matter. It is currently owned by Disney, Comcast Corp., NBCUniversal, News Corp, Providence Equity Partners and Hulu employees. The company is now in an initial negotiation with 10 potential buyers including Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., U.S. TV distributors, etc.

And it could be a good buy for any of the above mentioned companies, as Hulu recently hit a milestone of 1 million subscribers. The company’s CEO Jason Kilar said they are meeting expectations so far. They first offered subscription services a year ago under Hulu Plus, and had 875,000 paying customers as of the end of June. They are expecting premium users to surpass 1 million during these summer months, just in time to perk up the interest of potential buyers.

And the industry as a whole is booming. Adding to the online video competition is smart TV platform Flingo. It was founded in 2008 by former BitTorrent employees Ashwin Navin and David Harrison. Since they’ve been developing the platform for two years now, they’ve got some pretty cool technology in tow, and have locked in some good partnerships, a necessity in this business. Users can use Flingo via a new smart TV, Flingo-enabled BlueRay players or a streaming box such as Roku. In fact, the technology is embedded within over half the televisions sold these days, coming from companies like Samsung, LG, Vizio Insignia and Western digital, equivalent to 5.7 million screen throughout 117 countries worldwide.

This is all driving activity  in the big media and personal cloud arena, where data and storage are central to success. In this vein, Amazon announced an unlimited offline cloud music storage offering for only $20 a year under its Cloud Drive. The launch of the music service caused much discontent among users as it wasn’t officially supported on Apple’s mobile devices, a problem that the company has fixed now and can work perfectly fine on the iPad.

Sign up for 20GB worth of storage and you’ll get to upload an entire 200GB on your space.  There’s no need to match the size of your content to the amount that you’ll have to pay. It’s flat $20 a year, and the 5GB plan is not part of the offering.


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