Time Warner is interested in a major investment into streaming TV service Hulu. Hulu is now owned by 21st Century Fox, Disney and NBCUniversal. Time Warner wants a 25% stake, with plans to change how the service fundamentally works. Time Warner wants to remove episodes from current seasons off the service, which would make Hulu more like Netflix.
While removing current seasons from Hulu isn’t a condition of the investment, but could become a talking point if Time Warner does make a the large investment in the service. Removing next day TV would make the service less appealing, and could cause a lot of subscribers to jump ship in favor or Amazon or Netflix who have been heavily investing in original content to combat cable TV.
Time Warner thinks it could more customers to subscribe to their cable bundles if Hulu wasn’t streaming current TV shows the next day. What Time Warner is saying is they would be willing to spend millions of dollars to prevent customers from having the best experience. If this isn’t a monopoly than I don’t know what is!
Tell us in the comments below what you think about Time Warner’s crazy plan to keep cable bundles around for decades to come.