By Gustavo Buenrostro
Hulu has become the latest company to join the ever growing Disney family. Last Tuesday, Comcast sold its shares of Hulu to Disney making Disney the majority stakeholder of Hulu.
The question is why? Aside from the fact that it is just another place of revenue for Disney, there really is no point in having Hulu.
Disney can do two things with Hulu that would make sense.
One is to integrate Hulu with Disney’s own streaming service, Disney plus, coming out later this year.
People who are subscribed to Hulu will just be grandfathered in to Disney plus and have access to it.
Another possibility is that Disney shuts down Hulu so another streaming service won’t compete with their own.
They have the right to do that since they own the majority of Hulu.
It wouldn’t be the best decision but they would be able to do that. These are the options that make sense.
Another option is just to keep Hulu running. But then why own Hulu in the first place if they aren’t going to do anything with it?
The fans also don’t really gain anything from this deal. Disney might have done this, simply because they could. If Comcast wanted to sell, then buy it.
But Disney buying Hulu reveals a larger problem. Disney is monopolizing multiple areas of entertainment, and no one is really saying anything.
Having a monopoly is illegal but somehow they are getting away with it. Perhaps they have people lobbying so that the deals they make go as planned.
But what is apparent is that with all the companies that Disney now owns, they have control over a lot of entertainment.
People will either work for Disney or one of it’s subsidiaries under its umbrella or directly go against Disney because most of their competition will be the remaining companies that aren’t owned by Disney.
In the end, this buy from Disney doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.