Dish Outbid Competition for Hulu

Last month, six companies submitted their initial bids for video-streaming site Hulu, which put itself up for sale this past summer.

So who was the highest bidder? According to Business Insider, it was Dish Network, whose $1.9 billion offer beat out both Amazon and Yahoo. The satellite TV company might have been willing to outbid the competition because it’s interested in Hulu’s back-end technology, in addition to the content.

Technically, though, Google submitted the highest bid by a large margin, which was “something in the range of $4 billion.” (According to rumor, Larry Page personally flew down to Los Angeles to confer with Hulu.) But that offer came with special conditions—like getting more content for a longer period of time, AllThingsD speculated.

Hulu’s owners—which include Fox, Disney’s ABC, and Comcast’s NBCUniversal—were hoping for a better offer and were disappointed that no one offered more than $2 billion under their conditions, Business Insider said. The owners are still in the process of deciding what to do—and will likely go with Google or Dish, or maybe even decide not to sell at all.