HULU SALE IN TROUBLE

According to Reuters, a slew of speed bumps have slowed down interest and the bidding process and may even kill all hopes of selling the service. According to sources, the first bump in the road can be attributed to Hulu's owners -- News Corp., Disney, NBC Universal and Providence Equity Partners -- who may not all be on the same page when it comes to selling the service. Without a unified front, it's been hard for the company to find an acceptable offer from the likes of Google, Amazon, DirecTV and Dish Network, who have all talked about bidding between $500 million to $2 billion. As the service awaits a new round of bids next week, it's been said that the major players involved have (unsurprisingly) agreed to reject any lowball offers.

The second issue is content licensing. Some content owners have quietly been grumbling about a sale and legal threats have been bandied about. Some content owners are wanting a piece of the pie in the sale and others are considering pulling their content depending on who the winner of the bidding war is.

All of this is making the process of selling Hulu a real challenge and some sources are saying the owners may pull the company off the market.

APPLE CONSIDERS BID FOR HULU

Apple is toying with the idea of placing a bid on the Hulu video streaming service, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. In June, Hulu announced that it had hired Morgan Stanley and Guggenheim Partners to assist with a the sale of the company and rumor had it that Yahoo! was interested in making a bid at that time. Should an acquisition happen, Apple might use Hulu to create a subscription screaming video offering in an effort to compete with services such as Netflix. Currently, customers can only purchase or rent videos from iTunes.

Amazon is also interested in the company, although Bloomberg reported that it won’t make a move unless it can have guaranteed access to television shows. Hulu, which offers a premium Hulu Plus subscription option for $7.99 per month, said that it expects to surpass 1 million subscribers this August.

NORTEL PATENTS WON BY GROUP INCLUDING APPLE, MICROSOFT AND RIM

A group of companies including Apple, Microsoft, Research In Motion, Sony, EMC and Ericsson offered the winning bid in an auction that will net them Nortel’s extensive portfolio of patents. The bankrupt telecommunications company held roughly 6,000 patents, and the six-company consortium’s winning bid came in at $4.5 billion. Among the big losers were Google, which opened the bidding at $900 million, and Intel. Patents within the massive cache cover a wide range of technologies including wireless, voice, networking, optical data transmission and 4G LTE. RIM said it would be responsible for $770 million of the winning bid, and Ericsson separately stated it would pay $340 million. The rest of the companies in the consortium did not disclose their contributions.