Comcast (CMCSA) and Disney's (DIS) dance on the ownership of streaming service Hulu will come to a close this month.
Sept. 30 is now the new target date for the two companies to come to an agreement on Hulu, a step forward from the January 2024 timeline, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts revealed Wednesday at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Tech Conference in San Francisco.
"A little bit of news this morning — that we and Disney last week signed a modification to our agreement to bring forward the answer to that question to Sept. 30," Roberts said. "After some short period of time, Disney can call, we can put, and I believe that's what will happen."
Disney and Comcast did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2019, Disney and Comcast inked a deal giving Disney the option to buy out Comcast's stake in Hulu by 2024. The agreement originally valued the streaming service at a minimum of $27.5 billion.
However, Roberts suggested that the purchase price for Hulu could hit $30 billion based on "synergies" and its position as a high-value but fundamentally still new type of asset.
"No one has ever sold or auctioned off a pure-play streaming asset that's in this kind of position," Roberts added. "That's a scarce, kingmaker asset."
Hulu currently has about 48 million subscribers. Downloads of the app declined 13% year over year as of June, JPMorgan analyst Philip Cusick wrote in an Aug. 7 note to clients. However, engagement has remained relatively stable, the analyst said.
"We attribute weaker Hulu trends to less tent pole content and a pullback in advertising for the platform as Disney CEO Bob Iger re-evaluates the platform’s strategic fit in the company’s larger direct-to-consumer ambitions," Cusick wrote. "To that end, Disney announced that Hulu content will be available as a tile on Disney+ by the end of the calendar year."
For both Comcast and Disney, it'll still be a long road to get the deal to close, but it was time to begin moving forward, Roberts explained.
"We are excited to get this resolved," Roberts said. "It will take a long time to play out, but both companies wanted to get this behind us, so we pulled the date forward [and started] the process for Sept. 30."
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Allie Garfinkle is a Senior Tech Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter at @agarfinks and on LinkedIn.
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