What Was Fox' Hulu Blackout Really All About?

Fox blocked Cablevision customers from accessing Fox content on Hulu as well as Fox.com, only to reinstate access a few hours later. The whole episode was clearly meant as a show of force -- a warning shot, if you will. But this wasn't just about getting a few extra bucks from Cablevision.

Fox had to know that blocking access to Hulu would raise more than a few eyebrows at the Federal Communications Commission, and cause public interest groups to ring the alarm bells about possible consequences of media concentration. Which is actually quite convenient when one of your biggest competitors is about to enter a huge merger. Fox showed how much Hulu has to follow the lead of its corporate parents. We can be certain that the incident will have an impact on the ongoing legislative and regulatory review of the Comcast NBCU merger. After all, it's safe to assume that NBC has the same kind of power to block subscribers of a certain ISP from accessing Hulu -- only, that power is even more questionable if you're about to go down the aisle with the country's biggest ISPs. What will stop Comcast, regulators might ask, from arbitrarily stopping subscribers of competing broadband services from accessing NBC content on Hulu? Some may question whether a merged Comcast NBCU should own any part of Hulu at all.