The movie and TV streaming video service Hulu put itself up for sale a number of weeks ago. Now the company is considering the first actual offers from several companies. Bloomberg reports that Hulu could have received as many as 5 bids to buy the company in the past week, with prices as high as $2 billion expected. While Hulu has yet to officially reveal which companies have expressed interest in acquiring the service, the report claims that Amazon, Google, Yahoo and Dish Network all might have put up bids.
If Hulu does decide to sell itself off to one of the bidders, the winning company will obtain the rights to show first run TV shows from networks like NBC, Fox and ABC for five years, including two years where those TV episodes will only be shown online (legally anyway) on Hulu. However, Venture Beat reports that one company, DirecTV, didn't offer a large enough bid to purchase Hulu. As a result, it is now out of the running.
The current favorite to acquire Hulu at this point is Amazon. One of the reasons is that Hulu's CEO Jason Kilar used to work at Amazon under Jeff Bezos. In addition, Amazon has been expanding its own streaming video services under its Amazon Prime program, and may want to acquire Hulu in order to have content for its upcoming Android-powered tablet device. Dish Network would likely want to buy access to Hulu's content in order to help launch its own rumored streaming video service.
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