Business

Yahoo! joins the $1B hunt for Hulu

Yahoo! has jumped into the bidding for Web video destination Hulu, The Post has learned.

Sources close to the process say the bid from Yahoo!, along with offers from a handful of other suitors, value Hulu at upward of a billion dollars.

If Yahoo prevails, it would be CEO Marissa Mayer’s second $1 billion deal inside a month. The company just acquired micro-blogging service Tumblr for $1.1 billion.

Yahoo said it doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation.

Hulu has also attracted bids from DirecTV, Time Warner Cable and Guggenheim Digital Media, among others.

Hulu’s owners, including Disney, News Corp. and Comcast, are hoping to move quickly to narrow down the bids in the coming weeks. (News Corp. also owns The Post.)

A source said that Time Warner Cable’s bid may only be for an equity stake rather than for the whole company. The Post previously reported that Time Warner Cable boss Glenn Britt was trying to persuade other pay-TV operators to make a joint bid for Hulu.

Veteran media exec Peter Chernin, backed by Providence Equity Partners, was the first to leap into the Hulu fray. He offered a bid of between $500 million and $1 billion, depending on how many TV-programming rights were included in the deal, sources said.

Private-equity firms KKR and Silver Lake Capital have each submitted offers, according to Bloomberg.

Streaming video online is a fast-growing but increasingly competitive business that also includes Netflix and Amazon. Cable-programming powerhouse Discovery Communications is the latest to launch its own video destination, TestTube.

Hulu has a free service offering broadcast and cable shows, and has been investing in its own productions. It also has a premium subscription service that costs $7.99 a month and has around 4 million customers.