Hulu Is Said to Pick a New Chief Executive

The owners of the online streaming service Hulu are preparing to appoint Mike Hopkins, a veteran of Fox Networks, to be the next chief executive.

Mr. Hopkins would succeed Andy Forssell, who has been the acting head of Hulu since the service’s founding chief executive, Jason Kilar, left at the beginning of the year. Before Mr. Forssell stepped into the top job, he drove Hulu’s original programming strategy by commissioning shows like “Battleground” and “The Awesomes.”

Mr. Hopkins, on the other hand, is a distribution executive with 15 years of experience negotiating carriage deals for FX and other cable channels owned by 21st Century Fox. Most recently he helped ensure that Fox Sports 1, the company’s new sports network, and FXX, a spinoff of FX, would be widely available through cable and satellite providers. His appointment may signal Hulu’s shift from producing Web shows of its own and toward a posture of support for traditional TV providers and their television network partners.

Such a move — which would make Hulu a hub for TV Everywhere, the concept that cable subscribers should be able to stream shows and channels whenever and wherever they want — was telegraphed three months ago when Hulu’s owners declined to sell the joint venture.

Two of the owners of Hulu, 21st Century Fox and the Walt Disney Company, declined to comment on Friday. (The third owner, NBCUniversal, gave up its voting rights when it was acquired by Comcast in 2011.) A Hulu spokeswoman also declined to comment.

But Mr. Hopkins’s hiring was reported by Bloomberg and Reuters and was confirmed by a person with direct knowledge of it who insisted on anonymity because Hulu’s staff had not been notified of the appointment yet.

Mr. Hopkins, who started at Fox in 1997, has been the president of distribution for Fox Networks for the last five years. His responsibilities include digital strategies for the group of channels, so he has deep knowledge of TV Everywhere and the hurdles that networks and distributors have faced in trying to live up to that name. Distributors have adopted differing approaches toward making shows available on demand to their subscribers, and so have various broadcasters and cable channels; the resulting inconsistencies are often cited as one of the reasons more subscribers aren’t taking advantage of what has been offered.

Hulu could ease the transition to TV Everywhere. Currently there are two versions of Hulu, a free one with a limited selection of TV shows and a paid one called Hulu Plus. The paid version — which makes it easy to use Hulu on big-screen TVs and other devices — has more than four million subscribers, proving that its technology could be used to power similar on-demand services from cable and satellite providers.

When Fox and Disney said they had decided not to sell Hulu in July, they announced a new investment of $750 million in the joint venture. The cash was earmarked for program acquisition, program development, marketing and technology. On the programming front, the service has been busy: last month it licensed a library of shows from the BBC and ordered a second season of “The Awesomes,” an animated comedy created by Seth Meyers. It is scheduled to start showing three more series of its own in the next four weeks.