Hulu - Another Of Wall Street's Overvalued, Worthless Money-Bonfires (See: Netflix, Tesla)

in #investing6 years ago (edited)

As a customer, Hulu provides a pretty solid product. Much of it can be accessed for free, and when you compare their services to the competitor of standard cable, it's an order of magnitude cheaper. As a customer, Hulu ranges from "OK" to "pretty sweet", depending on one's personal entertainment needs.

As an investment, however, Hulu is another pile of hot garbage, not unlike Netflix or Tesla (or Bitcoin Gold), that somehow manages to maintain a non-negative stock price despite only ever succeeding at one thing - burning huge amounts of investor capital.

Hulu 3.jpg

"Comcast alone invested $300 million in Hulu last year and booked a $276 million loss..."

At least Hulu does it with less subsidy and crashed rockets than Elon Musk does!

Part of Hulu's strategy to improve their content seems to be "spend it and they will come." Hulu rapidly increased their "original content" expenditures over the last several years, from about $600 Million to $2.3 Billion. This puts them at the same level of expenditures as HBO:

Hulu 2.jpg

I guess that means their content is just as good. Right? Derp.

Let's see...2.3 billion in content expenses alone. Seems viable on an average subscription cost of $10/month. At $120/year, they only need over 19 million annual subscribers to break even on that. You know, before every other expense: taxes, hosting, licensing, security, personnel, technology, offices, bribes, corrupt lobbying, etc.

Actually, that doesn't seem to leave enough in the budget for all of that, does it?

Hulu 1.jpg

I guess they should have outbid Netflix for this asset.

In short, Hulu has been setup such that it practically needs the entire United States to be permanently subscribed to have any hope of returning any gains. Too bad they can't levy taxes, like other bloated, overpriced, failed institutions!

This may be "necessary" to compete with the other capital-immolating operations in this sector, such as Netflix, but I'm not going to put my capital behind it. I'll let Comcast step on that land-mine, and remain an occasional subscriber instead.

Thanks anyways, Wall Street. You do try so very hard.

Hulu 4.png

To screw us, in case that wasn't clear from the context. Per Zero Hedge.

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Great analytic piece, I must say this, if you have the right salesmen on the team, it does not matter the product or its profitability... The salesmen only need to create that positive sentiment and excitement and money would be coming in.... Elon Musk gets any crowd going at the end of the day, you believe that the Tesla vehicle can take off from Earth and land you on Mars...For Goldman, the institution strives in uncertainty and volatility, these are good days....

I'm continually impressed at the Street's ability to sell stocks for companies that don't now and have never made any money.

I didn't realize they in that poor of shape. I read that with Disney's most recent acquisition of 21st Century Fox, they "get" HULU with the deal. Perhaps they can package Hulu up with ESPN and spin it off to some other fools.

Oof, ESPN, there's another ship taking on water rapidly...

It's actually kind of like the userbase here who uses bid-bots, in the aggregate they burn cash in an attempt to retain customers, the customers/viewers/upvoters are all fickle with no loyalty to a brand and once the bids dry up they're left with 0 organic growth.

There are other classes of votebots on Steemit, which don't take SBD from public sources for their votes. One of them is @blacklist-a, which causes those bots to no longer support blacklisted accounts.

I reckon this is a better metaphor for media corporations supported by compensation from propagandists, which is not public.

Thanks!

No doubt Disney's streaming service is gonna greatly increase competition tho

Yes, I can't imagine that will help.

nice post ... btw how to join steem follower ??
is steem follower is safe ??? i mean my password when im login ??? sorry im new in steemit

Hi there,

Steemfollower is safe because it uses SteemConnect. You don't actually give your keys to Steemfollower.

I had the same worries as you but a variety of services use SteemConnect, I'm pretty sure it is secure.

ok thanks bro ..

people that will invest in tesla but not cryptos are the worst

Why?
Most cryptos are worse than fiat, and those that are better than fiat will either pay no dividends in the future, or pay but have a higher inflation rate than fiat and Tesla shares.

"most cryptos are worse than fiat" - please explain/back this up with your reasoning, I am curious

I was mostly joking when I compared a crypto to a stock but they are completely different. It is easier to value a stock than a crypto in my opinion and when we look at the earnings of Tesla I just find it to be extremely overvalued . People are just paying for the hype behind Elon Musk, nothing against him. Saying a crypto could inflate more than a fiat currency is just untrue and is one of the many reasons people are buying cryptos, because most of them will not inflate in value ever unlike fiat currencies that are inflated on purpose to drive economic growth.

ETH, IOS and BTS may just have a higher inflation rate than USD.
Consider ETH's inflation rate is near an annual 15%.
Cryptocurrencies and Stocks are more similar than you think.

Less than a dozen of the cryptocurrencies are inflation proof as you think, and even some of them may still be at a high creation rate.

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They're keeping the price lower for us to accumulate longer, at least.

Interesting. Time will tell if Hulu dies. When it does it will remember this article :)

important information thank you for sharing

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