Complete Coverage: NYC Television Week
New York -- DirecTV CEO Mike White said he wishes the company’s bid to buy Hulu had succeeded, but he’s open to other deals.
“It was a unique opportunity,” he said at NYC TV Week on Tuesday. Unfortunately, there aren’t many broad-based, general distribution over-the-top companies for sale, he added. “But I look at a lot of things.”
“We thought (Hulu) was a unique opportunity to serve millennials and we thought we could do something with it. We knew there were some things that need to be fixed. We had a plan,” he told moderator Mark Robichaux, editor-in-chief Multichannel News.
Hulu’s owners Disney, 21st Century Fox and Comcast opted to take it off the auction block last summer.
Meanwhile, White continues to fly the flag for an urgent need to keep distribution costs in check. Retransmission costs rose 50% this year, he said. Programming costs are way up, led by sports, which is growing by double digits. The industry “can’t raise prices 8-10% a year forever. It’s not sustainable,” he said.
The answer isn’t going "a la carte."
“But we need to create smaller bundles, or some greater flexibility for the consumers to have some say over the most expensive programming,” he said.
He and other operators have been saying this for years.
“Only if distributors can somehow stand up and have the courage to call into question in a couple of cases. It’s not going to happen overnight.”
“The consumer is not happy.”
