• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, July 11, 2013

The new owner of Hulu, whoever that might be, won’t be able to show network programs shortly after they’ve been on the air, former Walt Disney Co. chairman Michael Eisner told some reporters at the annual big media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho on Wednesday.

Which isn’t bulletin-type news. It’s always been known that buying Hulu is a little bit of a crap shoot. The current owners, 21^st Century Fox (formerly News Corp.)  Disney and Comcast, would like to take all of that fresh programming – unlike a bakery, day-old TV retains its shelf value—onto their own sites.

  “If [Hulu]  is bought by a content-oriented production kind of company, it will then move from a company that is basically repeat broadcasting to original broadcasting,”  Eisner told the Bloomberg news service . “That is very expensive. Therefore, the price you pay for the actual asset will be tempered by what you think you have to spend to make that asset work because NBC, Fox, ABC are not going to give you a great deal anymore on their own content... The thing they are selling it as is near-term repeats of network programs. The sellers, Disney and the other two owners, are selling it and taking away basically the next-day availability of their content.”

The only bidders still standing, apparently, are DirecTV and the tandem partnership of AT&T and the Chernin Group. Other bidders, like Guggenheim Partners (owner of the Hollywood Reporter) working with KKR apparently are no longer in the running.  And a long time ago (in Hulu-selling-terms)  it was lights out for Yahoo, whose reported $700 million now looks to be about $300 million short of the asking price for Hulu.(Time Warner Cable says it would invest in Hulu with the current owners, if they choose to hold on.)

If it’s DirecTv or AT&T/Chernin that wins, each could use it as destination site for users of its own services—the most boring of the scenarios, in my book. But the other cool thing is the new owner of Hulu could use it to preside over a brand new, streaming video service that cherry picks content from other places online—read that as YouTube, of course.    

 YouTube’s program partners have been grumpy about how much of their ad revenue they have to give to the site—45% to 55%, it’s been reported.

The bad vibes started last month with intrepid online pioneer/gadfly Jason Calacanis who warned in blog posts that YouTube producers might be ready to make other arrangements. "YouTube's biggest partners are looking at it 'as a marketing platform,' and that should put all YouTube staffers in a panic." he wrote, as quoted on Fierc eOnline Video.com.  “YouTube is becoming the best springboard to a better home,” for original online video, he said.

According to a story from TheWrap.com  Barry Blumberg, EVP of Alloy Digital and president of Smosh, YouTube’s single most subscribed channel, was “particularly outspoken, questioning whether the core of YouTube's business – short videos -- could ever be a huge source of revenue for producers.”

He said, “I’m not sure today -- like I was a long time ago -- that there is a lot of value in the 3-to-5 minute video. When is that ad market going to tip where it starts to make sense for us to produce this video, which is infinitely less expensive? It’s not getting there.”

But Alloy is aching to produce longer-form video and suddenly...there’s Hulu.

A bunch of defections from YouTube and a few other online sites could turn Hulu into what my buddy Jay Miletsky, who heads up curated site MyPodStudios, says YouTube should have done a long ago—a separate YouTube site, with fuller sized programs.

Maybe YouTube’s recent addition of some pay sites is a move in that direction, but Hulu could make that into a brand new, online-video-coming-out kind of event. It seems that $1 billion is a lot to spend for a brand name, with weakened network content. But Hulu also may be the way online video takes really big step into the future, and advertisers ought to be fascinated.

pj@mediapost.com