Hulu made headlines this spring by announcing a plan to adopt a cable television model and offer a bundle of channels, including sports channels for ESPN and Fox, for around $40 per month.
The streaming TV service has hired Reagan Feeney as vice president of network partnerships to help steer these deals through to completion.
Back in November, Feeney left a similar job with DirecTV, in which she was vice president of content. She had been with the satellite company for close to two decades.
Feeney, who was featured as part of SportsBusiness Journal’s Game Changers program in 2013, will report to Tim Connolly, Hulu’s senior vice president of strategic partnerships. She will manage the carriage deals as Hulu moves forward with its channel lineup.
The Hulu service of streamed channels will launch in the first half of next year, and it’s intended to be similar to offerings from Sling TV and PlayStation Vue. Programming networks like ESPN increasingly are exploring these types of streaming services as their cable distribution footprint continues to shrink. For example, in May, ESPN’s distribution fell below 90 million homes for the first time since 2005, according to Nielsen estimates. ESPN was in 89.797 million homes, and ESPN2 was in 89.697 million. Both channels had lost nearly 4 million subscribers in the past 12 months, according to Nielsen.
— John Ourand
