Hulu Bids Get Extended To End Of Week, Say Reports

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Anyone remember the old Looney Tunes cartoons? Specifically, the Duck Dodgers ones where Marvin the Martian briefly plugs his fingers into where his ears should be, waits a bit, and then wonderingly looks at Earth and says: “Where’s the kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!”. That’s about how I felt when I discovered that, in fact, the bids for Hulu had been extended.

We brought you the first word just a couple days ago, that several companies, including Yahoo, Google, Amazon and DirecTV, were looking to put in bids ranging up to $2 billion on the popular video streaming service. The bids were expected to be turned in on Wednesday–otherwise known as yesterday–but today, we find that the time to bid has been extended to the end of this week.

The reason behind the time extension is actually pretty simple, according to reports: basically, the companies involved in the bidding want more time to do some digging around in Hulu’s financial picture before deciding whether or not they want to buy. It’s a reasonable response–after all, Hulu hasn’t always had the best picture of things, at least not where money goes–so it’s not a surprise to see the bidding time get extended.

That and this is a pretty big stake, too. Leave aside for a minute the less than optimal content deals Hulu’s finding itself having to make to get content, they’ve got a pretty substantial library of shows on board. Whoever gets Hulu is going to have that library to use, and that’s going to make them a major player in the streaming video market, which seems to be shaping up as at least part of the future of home entertainment.

So what do you guys think here? Who’s going to end up with all the marbles? Will Yahoo have a library to compete with Google? Will Google get a library to compete with Netflix? Will Amazon do the same? Or will DirecTV be able to take it to Dish Network and their cohort Blockbuster Online? No matter who you think will come out on top–even if it’s a fifth party dark horse we haven’t heard of yet–we want to hear from you down in the comments section below!