Will Hulu disappear?
If Disney merges with Fox, Hulu will be 60% owned by Disney. Disney is preparing for Disney plus and has already taken its content off of competitors. Analysts project that Disney and Fox's merger may cause thousands of layoffs. Will Disney really allow Hulu to coexist? Or is this the end of Hulu? Are Hulu employee's safe?
I cut cable years ago. This year, I'm gonna start cutting subscription services. Everything has a few good years. Netflix pivoted right on time to go digital. We're now back to the problem that these portals set out to solve without fixing the licensing issues that Blockbuster had cracked to get all content in one place. Hulu may survive, but it may not be profitable.
Disney wants to compete with Netflix.. expand its subscription business.. I doubt it'll shut down Hulu
There is subscription exhaustion coming soon especially when companies implement AI to make sure accounts cannot be shared. I share all my accounts with my family and they share their accounts with me. At some point, I will just subscribe to one streaming service and just pay 30 days of subscription services (or free trials) to binge their top shows. It is not too hard to get a top list of streaming original content somewhere and just hunt down the highest quality programming and watch it in bursts. Unfortunately, I love some shoes which are not critically acclaimed as they are just my cup of team - HBO show Succession for instance. I love that show!
It is actually cheaper to just buy the top shows when they go on sale than subscribe to all their services.
Think the two-line version of their likely strategy is - Disney+ will be family content, while Hulu will be adult / mature content.
Heard a bunch of industry analysis that mentioned this same thing. I think Hulu will be fine. It consists of so much more movie and TV content than Disney can muster and enables their two prong approach to world domination.