HumanOrAlien t1_ixu26mc wrote on November 26, 2022 at 10:13 AM

>Disney plus' strength lies in star wars, marvel and other traditional kids disney assets.

While it is true for the US and Latin America, those Fox assets are used to a much greater effect on Disney+ in other territories. Disney+ is not just a babysitter service internationally. They have all the FX, Hulu and 20th Television shows which are the best part of Disney+ imo. I believe that if it wasn't for Hulu, they'd have brought everything to Disney+ in the US. But as long as Comcast owns a portion of Hulu they can't kill and have no option but to maintain that service.

TheSeventhAnimorph t1_ixu3tpm wrote on November 26, 2022 at 10:37 AM

> But as long as Comcast owns a portion of Hulu they can't kill and have no option but to maintain that service.

I mean, technically they could sell their share to somebody else, whether Comcast or another entity entirely. (Comcast would probably work best, though, since Comcast's ability to force Disney to buy their share in 2024 would presumably still stand if not renegotiated.) But of course, they'd probably still have to wait out contracts for stuff that they already have with Hulu before they could pull everything.

HumanOrAlien t1_ixu4ufz wrote on November 26, 2022 at 10:52 AM

Selling their stake means losing 45 million subscribers and a lot of content that Hulu directly owns. I think they don't want to do that. Also, they are in an already competitive market and they don't want to strengthen Comcast or anyone else's position by serving Hulu on a platter. This is my theory but it also logically makes sense to me at least.

DisturbedNocturne t1_ixu5lab wrote on November 26, 2022 at 11:03 AM

Comcast has expressed interest in buying Hulu, which makes sense for them. Peacock has a fraction of the subscribers, so they could just transition everything to where the subscribers are and suddenly own one of the larger streaming services. Of course, Disney hasn't seemed interest in that, likely for the reasons you mention: Why hand all those subscribers to Comcast when they can keep them in the Disney/Hulu ecosystem?