I understand why entertainment giant Disney bought social game developer Playdom. I also understand that sometimes it’s better to buy than build, and this is probably one of those times for Disney. Disney president and CEO Robert Iger stated it clearly when he told BusinessWeek: “You don’t get the kind of growth we want by building from the inside.”

What I’m wondering is whether Playdom was worth the $563 million price tag that Disney plunked down — which will swell to $762 million if Playdom meets predetermined performance benchmarks.

Now, you might say that a few hundred million is a drop in the bucket for Disney. After all, this is a company that had $36 billion in revenues and almost $6 billion in profits in FY 2009. And Disney paid $8.1 billion for Pixar in 2006 and $4.2 billion for Marvel last year, so nosebleed acquisitions are nothing new for Mickey’s team.

Perhaps more to the point, Disney just unloaded Miramax for $660 million, so you could say it “swapped” an aging art-house film unit for an up-and-coming social game developer. Disney made a handsome profit on Miramax, which it bought for $80 million in 1993.

But the fact that Disney can afford this hefty price for Playdom doesn’t mean it makes good fiscal sense. Electronic Arts snapped up Playfish for a comparatively reasonable $275 last year — and Playfish is bigger than Playdom.

Disney is gambling on Playdom’s ability to outmatch its competition, which includes Playfish and the grandaddy of social game makers, Zynga. But Disney is also betting that social gaming won’t die off as a passing fad, and that Facebook and other social venues will continue to support these games. (If it weren’t for Facebook’s massive scale, Zynga would not be anywhere near where it is today). These are some pretty aggressive gambles.

The price tag of this deal reminds me of other notorious acquisitions of the past decade, some of which crippled their buyers: Time Warner/AOL, AOL/Bebo, News Corp./MySpace.

The latter deal didn’t seem so overblown while MySpace was riding the crest of a popularity wave during its acquisition in 2005. Of course, that was before Facebook blew it out of the water, both in user growth and advertising sales. Facebook is expected to top at least $600 million (though recent estimates put the number closer to a billion) in advertising revenue this year, while ad revenue to MySpace is expected to decline 21% to $385 million, according to eMarketer estimates. At this point, MySpace seems like an albatross for News Corp., which on multiple occasions has had to fend off rumors of a fire sale for the flagging unit.

This underscores the risks of paying top-dollar for flavor-of-the-moment properties. It’s all fine and good if those properties can retain their cool and appreciate over time. But very few do. Remember Bebo? It pioneered many of the same concepts that made Facebook successful today, and look where it ended up.

Or take Disney’s own purchase of Club Penguin for $350 million in 2007. The kids-oriented virtual world failed to meet performance benchmarks that would have sweetened the deal, and traffic to the site has been declining. Barring a stunning turnaround, it’s not looking like Club Penguin will go down in history as one of Disney’s corporate coups. Given the steep price Disney is paying, we may be saying the same thing about Playdom—another company who makes its money selling virtual goods—a few years from now.

Image courtesy of Facebook.

Comcast has spent much of the past two years maneuvering against Hulu. In January 2008, the cable giant pre-empted Hulu’s long-rumored debut by launching its own free, ad-supported online TV venture, Fancast. This year, Comcast and Time Warner partnered for a service they call TV Everywhere, which essentially means free online video content for current subscribers to either company’s cable package.

Now comes news of Comcast’s imminent purchase of 51% of NBC Universal, which is a 30% stakeholder in Hulu. This begs the question: What impact will the Comcast-NBCU deal have on Hulu?

Some bloggers have theorized that Comcast will try to kill Hulu. Read my lips: it won’t happen.

Comcast knows a good brand when it sees one, and Hulu has carved out a comfortable space as the go-to destination for online TV content (much as YouTube has dominated the user-generated video space pretty much since its inception). According to comScore, Hulu ranked second among US online video properties by videos viewed in October. The site was also in the top 10 as ranked by unique viewers. Not bad for a relatively new site. Fancast, by contrast, doesn’t show up on any credible lists of top video destinations.

It’s in Comcast’s best interest to nurture and shape the Hulu brand rather than abandon it and push a nonstarter (Fancast) in people’s faces.

It should also be noted that Comcast will have only a minority stake in Hulu. The other partners in the venture–News Corp. and Disney–will flex their muscle in any decision over what happens to the site. GE, which will still own 49% of NBC, won’t be muzzled, either.

That said, it’s likely that Comcast will nudge Hulu further in the direction it is already leaning: toward a paid-video experiment that will likely involve a portion of the content on the site.

News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch has been a strong proponent of paid models for his other online properties (notably the Wall Street Journal), and he and other Hulu principals have made noise about tinkering with transactional monetization on the popular video site. Having Comcast whisper over his shoulder will only embolden Murdoch to pull the trigger on this plan.

Look for 2010 to be the year when Hulu and YouTube start charging for some of the content they’ve been offering for free. Apple, too, is rumored to be shopping a TV subscription service that would carry premium content for $30 per month to the consumer.

How will consumers react to these experiments? Unless it’s ultra-premium content (live broadcasts of top-rated shows or feature films) consumers are likely to revolt against any plan that charges them for something they have been getting for free.

Update: Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and COO Steve Burke briefly discussed what the deal will mean for Hulu after the sale was officially announced this morning. From The Wall Street Journal:

“We see, with more distributors and more technologies, what consumers want. We want to be part of delivering to them,” Mr. Roberts said. “The reality is consumers want electronic distribution. Some of it, they want it for free. Some of it, they want it in subscription, and some of it, they want it pay-per-view.”

He said there are no plans to alter Hulu’s free model. “That is certainly not in the cards,” he said when an analyst asked if a “Hulu Premium” is a possibility.

Mr. Burke called Hulu and TV Everywhere — Comcast and Time Warner’s online-video initiative — complementary products, with broadcast TV shows appearing on Hulu and premium cable programs on TV Everywhere.

“Right now, NBC Universal is distributing a lot of their broadcast content on Hulu, and they have been quite careful not to put too much of their paid-for-cable content out for free over the Internet. We think both those strategies are smart and appropriate — not that they asked us,” he said. “I think right now, the way NBC Universal are managing those two ways of distributing are very similar to the way we would want to do it when the two companies come together.”

There you have it. Now let’s see if it turns out to be true.