Powerful Senator Herb Kohl (D.-Wis.), who serves as the chair of the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee, wants NBC Universal to divest its stake in online video site Hulu as part of conditions to approve its merger with Comcast,B&C reports.
The proposal came in a letter from Kohl to the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, which outlined several of his concerns, including the merger’s impact on online distribution.
The conditions would require the company to divest its stake in Hulu within a year and extend program access rules to online video.
According to the article, other conditions include keeping Comcast from discriminating against Internet distribution of programming that competes with Comcast or TV Everywhere and and keeping Comcast from favoring its own content.
That isn’t the issue. They need to be sure that all the networks have to be available to the internet. That is the future – the new pipe to the TV is the ethernet. That is Comcast’s big fear. They see it coming and the only way they can control it is to control the content. That is what they tried to do to DirecTV last year with NHL and Versus. Buying NBC Universal is just another step. Look at the exclusives they have in their on-demand. There is a strategy there and it is to control content through ownership or exclusive contracts.
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