Hulu, Seeking a Buyer, May Shift Course

But the valedictory lap did not last long. Even as the number of views were adding up, so were concerns within the company about the site’s future.

That’s because Hulu, the Web streaming service that is jointly owned by the Walt Disney Company, NBCUniversal, and News Corporation, is up for sale. And each of the potential buyers brings with it a different vision for what Hulu should become.

The interested parties include Time Warner Cable, DirecTV, the Chernin Group — an investment firm owned by the former News Corporation president Peter Chernin — and two private equity firms, Guggenheim Digital Media and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.

Yahoo, which completed its $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr on Thursday, had also expressed interest with an exploratory offer of $600 million to $800 million, according to several people briefed on the sale, who, like several others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because negotiations for the sale were continuing.

The eventual value of Hulu (which would include the brand, its accessible interface and the rights to many of the television shows it offers) is expected to be roughly $1 billion. Binding bids are due by Friday, though one person familiar with the process said the deadline could be delayed until next month.

Web sites change hands all the time, but Hulu’s sale could signal something more fundamental: the end — at least in its current form — of one of the pioneers of online streaming, which in recent years has become an increasingly popular way to view content.

Hulu has a free Web site, with streams of TV episodes supported by ads, and a subscriber-only section, called Hulu Plus,which offers additional episodes at a cost. In 2012, Hulu had $695 million in revenue and the Hulu Plus service had four million paying users, according to the company.

Depending on the buyer, Hulu could be used to foster the further growth of online streaming as an alternative to the cable TV bundle. Or the site could be kept under lock and key, exclusively for the use of cable subscribers.

Time Warner Cable, for instance, would like to use Hulu to create an industrywide “TV Everywhere” hub in which subscribers could have access to network and cable shows on-demand. A distributor like DirecTV could use Hulu — both its brand name and its technology — to sell a new service that streams a bundle of television channels to subscribers over the Internet. Intel is trying to create a similar type of service; if it succeeds, then traditional distributors may feel the need to sell something similar.

For cable or satellite distributors, Hulu is also a prize for an existential reason: as an executive at one distributor put it, “It’ll make us look like we’re ready for the future.”

But that option concerns some Hulu employees who are fond of the company’s quirky Silicon Valley-meets-Hollywood culture. They see the site as an innovative service that untethers shows from the television, not as another piece of a costly cable bill.

“Can Hulu remain Hulu if a cable company buys it?” asked one person close to the company.

Several Hulu executives have already left the company, amid worries about the future, and it is possible there could be an exodus of creative and engineering employees if a cable operator wins the auction and the site loses its start-up identity.

Jason Kilar, the founding chief executive of Hulu, left in March and was temporarily replaced by Andy Forssell, the senior vice president for content and now the acting chief executive. Richard Tom, the former chief technology officer at Hulu, left after Mr. Kilar, as did Johannes Larcher, the former senior vice president for international operations. Later this summer, Pete Distad, Hulu’s senior vice president for marketing and distribution, also plans to depart. A spokeswoman for Hulu declined to comment.

Mr. Chernin has the most personal connection to Hulu, as he championed the start-up from its inception when he was still at News Corporation. This year, Mr. Chernin reportedly bid about $500 million for the company. The Chernin Group receives financial backing from Providence Equity Partners, which until October owned a 10 percent stake in Hulu. (Providence is not directly involved in the bid.)

Now, AT&T is in talks to join the Chernin Group in a bid for Hulu, a pairing that would give Mr. Chernin’s media, technology and entertainment investment group the financial heft to go up against major corporations. (The technology Web site AllThingsD first reported on the partnership. An AT&T spokesman declined to comment.)

For AT&T, Hulu could present the opportunity to expand its “U-verse Screen Pack,” a $5-a-month option that lets U-verse TV subscribers stream videos.

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

Seeking Out Peer Pressure

Now, if I had the same experience with a gastroenterologist I had chosen based on glowing Yelp evaluations as I did at Momofuku, I would be checking myself into the emergency room.

My monkfish — a special favorite of the Yelp hordes — tasted like a pencil eraser. It was also so cold that it could not be described as cooked. It was deceased.

As for the destination-place atmosphere, imagine the decibel level of a Justin Bieber concert as filmed by Leni Riefenstahl. The service was haute rude. Our waitress responded to my timid questions about the oysters with a pseudopopulist arrogance that implied I was both hopelessly out of touch with the everyday experience of fishermen and boat owners, and too much a rube to comprehend the subtle distinctions of taste and class that characterized the world of the fancy shellfish.

And those fake proletarian desserts! “Compost cookie.” “Cereal milk.” “Crack pie.” The idea, I suppose, is that if you eat such downwardly mobile treats, it is only because you are so confident of your upwardly mobile status.

Yet the fact is that the crowd of Yelp reviewers had decided that Momofuku was the place to eat. And so we found ourselves eating at Momofuku.

For the pop sociologists of the period after World War II, “crowd” was a scare word, an impersonal entity that would extinguish your personality, spew contempt at your uniqueness, disable the operation of your individual instincts and judgment.

Now the “wisdom of crowds” has become an accepted platitude. “Peer pressure,” far from being a pernicious influence, is something we seek out as we race from one review site to another.

You might call this the Yelpification of culture. The goal and appeal of Yelp, and of countless similar companies, is to make everyone, regardless of income or social status, feel like a teenager trying to get into an exclusive private school that evening.

Heaven forbid that you should meet one of your friends at your favorite Thai place. No, you have to meet at everyone’s favorite Thai place. Because if your friend is like some of my friends, he or she will be Yelping the place you suggest, and you’re in big trouble if your favorite Thai restaurant has — unbeknown to you, who have been going there for 27 years — the status of the Ebola virus among savvy restaurant-goers. (“This place should be BYOT — Bring your own turmeric! Stay away!! Yuck!!!”)

No, you have to go to a place that has received the best reviews from lots of people, even if you have no idea who they are or what their motives might be for spending their time rating restaurants. Gone are the days when “conformist” was a slur on someone’s character. Now the idea is that if you are not following the crowd of five-star dispensers, you are a tasteless, undiscriminating shlub.

Welcome to the lonely crowd of the 21st century, both a revival of and a variation on the original “lonely crowd,” a term famously coined by the sociologist David Riesman in his best-selling 1950 book of that name.

Riesman argued that as the economy turned producers who manufacture goods into consumers buying them, the nature of society changed. People went from being “inner-directed’ to being “outer-directed,” from heeding their own instincts and judgment to depending on the judgments and opinions of tastemakers and trendsetters. Having lost touch with themselves, outer-directed souls were all alone in the midst of other people.

Of course, in one important respect, Riesman’s thesis has been radically refuted. Whereas he and other postwar intellectuals feared the conformist power of the crowd, we now fear the aberrant individual or individuals lurking in the crowd. The tragedy in Boston makes the postwar worries about mass society, inflamed by the perceived Communist threat at the time, seem trivial.

But in other respects, Riesman’s insights seem like the seeds of our own time.

Bits Blog: Virus Seeking Bank Data Is Tied to Attack on Iran

A security firm said Thursday that it had discovered what it believed was the fourth state-sponsored computer virus to surface in the Middle East in the last three years, apparently aimed at computers in Lebanon.

The firm, Kaspersky Lab, said that the virus appeared to have been written by the same programmers who created Flame, the data-mining computer virus that was found to be spying on computers in Iran in May, and that it might be linked to Stuxnet, the virus that disrupted uranium enrichment work in Iran in 2010.

The latest virus, nicknamed Gauss after a name found in its code, has been detected on 2,500 computers, most in Lebanon, the firm said. Its purpose appeared to be to acquire logins for e-mail and instant messaging accounts, social networks and, notably, accounts at certain banks — a function more typically found in malicious programs used by profit-seeking cybercriminals.

The researchers said the target banks included several of Lebanon’s largest — the Bank of Beirut, Blom Bank, Byblos Bank and Credit Libanais — along with Citibank and the online payment system PayPal.

“We have never seen any malware target such a specific range of banks,” Costin Raiu, Kaspersky’s director of global research and analysis, said in an interview. “Generally, cybercriminals target as many banks as possible to maximize financial profit, but this is a very focused cyberespionage campaign targeting certain users of online banking systems.”

Lebanon experts said that an American cyber espionage campaign directed at Lebanon’s banking system would seem to be a plausible possibility, given Washington’s concerns that the country’s banks are being used as a financial conduit for the Syrian government and for Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group and political party.

“The United States has had a number of Lebanese banks under the microscope for a while,” said Bilal Y. Saab, a Lebanon expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, who said the banks “operate much like Swiss banks” in terms of secrecy. “A computer virus could completely undermine that,” he said.

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab, based in Moscow, said they found the Gauss virus while analyzing the Flame virus in June. Flame is a reconnaissance tool that can capture images of a user’s computer screen, record e-mail and chat sessions, turn on microphones remotely and monitor keystrokes and network traffic. It can infect an offline computer through a USB stick or a Bluetooth connection.

Kaspersky’s researchers said they were confident that Gauss was the work of the same hands as Flame, because the two viruses were written in the same language (known as C++) on the same platform and shared some code and features. Different people probably wrote Doqu and Stuxnet, the first two state-sponsored viruses to surface in recent years, they said, but all four were probably commissioned by the same state-sponsored entity.

“There is absolutely no doubt that Gauss and Flame were printed by the same factories,” Mr. Raiu said. “An early version of Stuxnet used a module from Flame, which shows they are connected. Stuxnet was created by a nation-state — it simply could not have been designed without nation-state support — which means Flame and Gauss were created with nation-state support as well.”

Kaspersky Lab has declined to speculate on which nation-states were responsible. The New York Times reported in June, based on interviews with officials in several countries, that Stuxnet was jointly developed by the United States and Israel.

Security experts not connected with the lab were less sure that a government was behind Gauss. “It’s a fairly large leap, in terms of deductive reasoning, to assume that because they share a common architectural platform, this variant is also state-sponsored,” said Will Gragido of RSA, a security firm, who has studied Flame but has not yet analyzed Gauss. “It’s possible the code was made available underground and repurposed or reused by cybercriminals.”

Kaspersky researchers said Gauss contained a “warhead” that seeks a very specific computer system with no Internet connection and installs itself only if it finds one. “It’s done in such a clever way that security researchers cannot analyze it, because they don’t know the decryption key that unlocks the true purpose of that program,” Mr. Raiu said.

Gadgetwise Blog: App Smart Extra: Seeking a Five-Letter Word for Help

This week’s App Smart column was all about apps that transform the traditional crossword puzzle experience into a touchscreen-friendly, socially-networked, answer-hinting experience on your smartphone or tablet.

But if you do still appreciate the joys of scribbling on a real printed newspaper, swapping between pencil and pen as you close in on the answer to word clues then there are crossword “assistant” apps that can add a little technological boost to your puzzling without taking it totally digital.

Some simply leverage word-matching tech to suggest likely clue answers based on word-lengths and the letters you’ve found already. Crossword Solver, free on Android and Crossword Solver Free on iTunes do this, searching among thousands upon thousands of words for ones that could possibly match, and even suggesting anagrams in the former app’s case. As a tool to help you, they absolutely work because you have to at least have guessed a few letters of the clue yourself. But they lack finesse and they’re mechanical and soulless. That may be the very opposite of the creative work of solving a word puzzle.

If you’d prefer a more gentle crossword solver, you may love Agent X Word which is free on iOS. It’s got a slickly graphical interface that plays on a cartoon spy meme, and it actually asks you to type in the clue that you’re stuck on. For example, typing in “long thick hair” and tapping on the hint button led to the app saying it was “60% sure” the first letter was “M”– tallying nicely with the actual answer “mane.” If you tap on “gimme the answer” it gives you a similar short list of guesses, with a confidence probability assigned to them.

Perhaps the most pleasant aspect of all of these apps is that the art of playing crosswords isn’t being bumped off by digital media — it’s being augmented by it.

Cloud Leaves Some Tech Giants Seeking a Silver Lining

On June 11, Apple showed its next operating system for iPhones and iPads. It offered maps and speech recognition, plus music and movies on iTunes, all tied via the Internet to Apple’s “cloud” of servers.

A week later, Microsoft, known better for software, demonstrated the Surface tablet, its answer to the iPad. The Surface interacts with both the Web and Microsoft’s cloud, called Windows Azure. And, last Wednesday, Google introduced its newest cloud-connected phone and tablet, as well as a media player called Nexus Q. The player works with the devices, the Internet and the Google cloud.

Remarkably fast, a multibillion-dollar industry is moving away from personal computers made mostly with Microsoft Windows software and Intel semiconductor chips. The combined revenue from these largely so-called Wintel desktops and laptops last year was about $70 billion at Dell and Hewlett-Packard. But these companies played virtually no part in the June shows from Apple, Microsoft and Google.

Asked what part it hoped to play in the cloud-dominated future, Dell declined to comment. An H.P. spokesman said in a statement that his company had computer servers and software in “eight of 10 of the world’s most trafficked sites, four out of five of the world’s largest search engines, the three most popular social media properties in the U.S.” He said nothing about PCs.

The tech future also poses challenges for Intel, which has been diversifying. Its chips are now in Apple computers and a host of other devices. Intel still has a significant place in the market, but often with lower-margin chips, and increased competition. Another chip company, Nvidia, got a shout from Google’s stage.

We are seeing a new business ecosystem with all sorts of mobile and cloud-connected devices. Each is a powerful computer, with connections to a nearly infinite amount of data storage and processing in the cloud.

“We’re entering this era where consumer electronics is the hardware, and the software and the cloud,” said Matt Hershenson, Google’s hardware director. His view increasingly holds for business computing, too.

Coincidentally, Friday was the fifth anniversary of the iPhone’s introduction. Next week, cloud-based software applications for the iPhone from outside developers will have their fourth anniversary. And, already, cloud devices that Google called experimental last year are now almost mainstream.

People now use their iPhones and tablets in their jobs. More than five million businesses write documents and swap spreadsheets in Google’s cloud-based applications. Microsoft, with arguably the most at risk in this transition, has 273 business and finance applications for sale in its cloud store, Azure Marketplace.

In the new ecosystem, many rules are still being worked out. Amazon, with its Kindle tablet and a successful online computing cloud and software store, may yet be a significant player. So may Barnes & Noble, which has a decent tablet and apps in the Nook reader but lacks a big cloud data center.

A few things are already clear. Power now centers on controlling millions of computers tied together in the cloud, with a complementary marketplace where people can find, sell and manage applications. Few physical stores sell software anymore, but sales channels still matter. Even the iPhone did not really take off until it had apps, sold through Apple’s store.

Those apps were written mostly by outside software developers. Developers have been important to the industry for decades. If you keep thousands of them happy with decent software-making tools and a big potential audience, as Microsoft learned, they will build products that make you essential. When the PC came along, these were games like Flight Simulator and productivity software like Lotus; now we have Angry Birds and modifications of Google Apps.

In the Wintel world, new versions of Microsoft Windows came out every few years, with major software projects tied to desktops and laptops. By contrast, in less than five years Apple has announced six versions of its mobile operating system. Google’s operating system for cloud-connected laptops, called Chrome, is updated every six weeks. The June meetings were intended to get developers working on consumer products that would be out by Christmas.

“Urgency has a whole new meaning now; you can’t slip,” said Andy Peterson, a senior software engineer at L4 Mobile, which makes mobile applications for companies like Sony and MTV. He was one of 5,500 developers at Google’s I/O conference last week. “I started at the company last September,” he said, “and I’m on my fourth application.”

Still, he says, the pace and the ability to get a creation into so many hands is exciting.

Dell and H.P. might not be joyful, but should they be glum? With so many devices, the consistent experience may be guided by centrally managed cloud software, but hardware is where the experience lives. That is why Steve Jobs was so long adamant that Apple control both hardware and software, and why even now Apple is picky about which independently produced apps are allowed in its store.

Microsoft apparently showed off the Surface without much notice to longtime hardware partners but could now bring them in to build it. Google’s strongest outside relationship with a hardware maker seems to be with Samsung. Google’s new tablet was made by Asustek of Taiwan.

Google says it is open to working with the incumbents — but these companies have to completely reimagine themselves, centering on using their esoteric knowledge of how business uses technology, rather than how to make a cheaper PC.

“What H.P. and Dell can do is understand the needs of the enterprise,” said Sundar Pichai, senior vice president for Chrome at Google. “They can say, ‘Here is our tablet, we have phones, here is how it will work across your company.’ We don’t have a sales force that can do that.”

That may mean giving up on the consumer market, more or less. But it beats being a relic of the old world.