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.

"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:

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?

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.

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

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Sources: Google, Bloomberg, Zero Hedge, FreeRealTime.com, Variety, DuckDuckGo
Copyright: Zero Hedge, 30 Rock, Pinterest