What to Do With Hulu?

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Source | Flickr

The trend of disruption in traditional media and entertainment models seems to be growing stronger every day. It’s now commonplace to read about mega mergers between enormous companies, record contracts doled out to content producers, and newly minted businesses overseen by brilliant minds that promise to finally capitalize on the opportunity presented by new formats like mobile video.

In an environment where there are a virtually endless amount of interesting cases, though, one in particular stands out to me, Hulu. Sitting at an intersection of a few different pieces of the media environment, Hulu offers a unique case. It’s a streaming service, and it recently added a package with live TV. It boasts The Handmaid’s Tale, a show that won Outstanding Drama series before any show from Netflix or Amazon did, but it is not typically considered to be on the same tier as either of those players. It’s owned by Disney, 21st Century Fox, Comcast, and Turner, meaning that it has a major interest in how both the AT&T/Time Warner (Turner’s parent company) and Disney/21st Century Fox mergers play out. It has an impressive 17 million subscribers, and yet it lost a reported $920 million last year.

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When Sandberg Met Allen

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A Brief Analysis of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s Interview with Mike Allen

Courtesy of Chuck Kennedy / Axios

This week, Axios will be conducting a series of interviews with Facebook executives about the company’s influence in the 2016 election, the challenges it faces, and what it plans to do to solve the problem. For a brief overview of the situation overall, check out this piece I wrote explaining the stakes and how each group hopes to benefit from the exercise.

Axios and Facebook: A High Wire Act

The first interview in the series was also the one that is likely to be the most noteworthy. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg sat down for what became a more than 30-minute long event. The interview was live-streamed, leaving both Sandberg and Allen little room for error in a very high-profile situation.

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Axios and Facebook: A High Wire Act

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The Fast-Rising Media Company and the Tech Giant are Partnering for a Series of Important Interviews

About a year ago, right after the 2016 Presidential Election, Mark Zuckerberg ridiculed the idea that Facebook influenced the election as “crazy”. Oh, how far we’ve come.

Facebook, struggling to defend itself as it becomes clear how Russia and its operatives used the platform to spread misinformation and stoke anxieties, is currently in the midst of a large-scale PR effort aimed at influential and powerful decision-makers in DC. Beyond several long and reflective posts on its site from leaders like Zuckerberg, the company has also taken out ads in leading newspapers. Here’s an example of an ad that ran in the Washington Post last week.

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Large Scale Partnerships Will Push Innovation

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How Partnerships, Some Obvious and Some Unlikely, Will Lead the Next Stages of Innovation


This week, Domino’s and Ford announced a corporate partnership that will enable Ford to use autonomous cars to deliver Domino’s pizza to customers in the Ann Arbor, Michigan area.

Ford and Domino’s to deliver pizza using self-driving cars in new test

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