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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