NBCUniversal Ends Hulu Content Sharing Deal
Following the finalisation of Disney purchasing 20th Century Fox in 2019, Disney and Comcast announced that they had made an agreement where Disney would get complete operational control of Hulu since Disney owned 66% of the streaming service.
This agreement stated that from as early as January 2024, Comcast can require Disney to buy its interest in Hulu and Disney can require Comcast to sell that interest to Disney for its fair market value at that future time. Independent experts will assess Hulu’s fair market value, but Disney has guaranteed a sale price for Comcast that represents a minimum total equity value of Hulu at that time of $27.5 billion.
In that agreement was a clause that Comcast’s NBCUniversal could start pulling its content from Hulu in 2022, and today, Comcast has confirmed that it is going to be terminating its content-sharing deal with Hulu, meaning that from this fall, new episodes of NBCUniversal’s content including “Saturday Night Live”, “Law & Order: Organized Crime”, “The Voice” and “American Auto” will no longer be available on Hulu the day after they air. This will also impact on the rest of NBCUniversal’s broadcast and cable lineup from September 2022.
Other content from NBCUniversal will also slowly be removed from Hulu, though it’s unclear exactly what will be leaving.
However, not all of NBCUniversal’s content will be removed from Hulu, as they still have catalogue rights for a few more years for many shows “Law & Order: SVU,” “This Is Us,” “The Mindy Project,” “30 Rock,” “Parenthood,” “Friday Night Lights” and “Will & Grace.”
This is being done to increase the value of Comcast’s own streaming service, Peacock, though it will reduce the value of Hulu. So it was a balancing act for Comcast as to what was better in the long run.
Disney Insiders have told Variety that Hulu will be able to spend money on creating more original content, rather than paying for NBC’s content and will also give Hulu more control over the ad inventory on the service.
Comcast and Disney are also currently in arbitration over Hulu, so they can work out an early agreement for Disney to buy Comcast’s 33% stake in Hulu.
What do you think of NBCUniversal removing its content from Hulu?
