Hulu, LLC — commonly "Hulu" — is a US subscription streaming service headquartered at 2500 Broadway, Santa Monica, California. It was founded in 2007 as a joint venture of NBCUniversal and News Corp. (Fox), launched publicly in March 2008, and later added Disney, Providence Equity, and AT&T/WarnerMedia as minority holders. Disney assumed full operational control in 2019 and acquired Comcast/NBCUniversal's remaining 33% stake, closing in July 2025 for a total of roughly $9 billion against a $27.5–29 billion asset valuation. Hulu is therefore a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS); its financials are consolidated into Disney's Direct-to-Consumer segment and are not separately reported. Third-party trackers put headcount in the ~2,300 range.
Operations: Hulu operates an ad-supported and ad-free subscription video-on-demand service available only in the US, plus Hulu + Live TV, a virtual MVPD offering live broadcast and cable channels. Disney's Q4 FY2025 report listed 59.7 million Hulu SVOD subscribers and 4.4 million Hulu + Live TV subscribers (64.1 million total). Disney has been integrating Hulu content into Disney+ and announced plans to merge the services into a single app.
Litigation posture: an operating company defending against patent assertion. The database shows 1 case, 0 as plaintiff and 1 as defendant — consistent with a target of third-party patent suits rather than an enforcer. The single tracked matter is the JPML proceeding In re: Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC Patent Litigation (MDL No. 2845), in which Hulu was one of twelve defendants; the Panel denied centralization in August 2018. The underlying suit, Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Hulu, LLC (C.D. Cal. 2:17-cv-07611, filed October 2017), asserted data-compression patents (e.g., U.S. 8,934,535; 9,769,477) against Hulu's video-streaming technology. Hulu joined Amazon and Netflix in PTAB inter partes reviews (IPR2018-01169, -01187, -01189, -01195) of those patents; the '477 patent's claims were ultimately held unpatentable. Realtime Adaptive Streaming also sued Netflix, Google, Apple, Samsung, Sony, and others across the Eastern District of Texas, Delaware, and Colorado, a pattern characteristic of a mass-filing licensor.