Yahoo has submitted a bid to buy Hulu, Peter Kafka at All Things D reports.
There's no word on the price.
Yahoo isn't alone in its interest in Hulu. KKR and Silver Lake are interested in Hulu, as well, Bloomberg reports. Other companies in the mix: Time Warner Cable, the Chernin Group, and Guggenheim Digital.
The Chernin Group is run by Peter Chernin, one of the original advocates for Hulu at News Corp. Guggenheim Digital is led by Ross Levinsohn, who was Yahoo's interim CEO before Marissa Mayer took over.
Hulu is owned by News Corp, Comcast, and ABC. It's been in play for a long time.
In 2011, Amazon, Google, and Yahoo all took a look at buying Hulu. It never happened because Hulu's owners and bidders couldn't agree on a price or content deals.
The bulk of Hulu's value is built around its premium content. Its parent companies weren't willing to give guarantees of exclusivity to Hulu's new owner in the past.
On Twitter, digital executive Jason Hirschhorn said of Hulu, "Buying @hulu is like buying a house lease in London. You can live there, but it ain't yours."
Yahoo's bid is a bit of a shock, since it just paid $1.1 billion for Tumblr. Many people believed that Mayer would want to digest Tumblr before making another big bid.
The last time Yahoo was interested in Hulu, it was willing to pay $2 billion for the site. We don't think much has changed in the last two years to make Hulu significantly more valuable.
Last October former CEO Jason Kilar cashed out $40 million in Hulu stock at a $2 billion valuation. We would think that Hulu's owners want a premium on that valuation.
With a half-dozen interested parties bidding, that could be possible. Then again, with half a dozen parties interested, we might see some creative ideas, like paying a low upfront price, but guaranteeing more money down the road.
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