In the latest twist, All Things D reports that private-equity firm Silver Lake has folded its cards, leaving DirecTV, Guggenheim Partners, Time Warner Cable and AT&T as the leading candidates. A recent report cited sources who claimed DirecTV would seal the deal by the end of June but, in retrospect, that may have just been posturing by one of the parties in the long-running negotiations.

As it stands, the Hulu sales process is weighed down by conflicting strategic interests and complicated licensing issues. Specifically, Hulu’s current owners — News Corp, Disney and Comcast– all supply the daily shows that are the lifeblood of Hulu, but are conflicted about how to make them available to an outside buyer, including whether a subscription or advertising model is best.

As in the past, Hulu’s current owners and potential buyers remain hung up on content licensing terms. The difficulty lies in the fact that Hulu’s sale value depends entirely on how much content the new owner will be able to take out the door — and for how long. On one hand, the broadcasters don’t want to hand out long term content deals because that would undercut their ability to shop their shows to the likes of Amazon and Netflix; a potential owner, meanwhile, doesn’t want to own a platform that will run out of content in the near future. (The plot thickens further if you consider AT&T’s interest in leveraging data plans).

The bottom line is that yet another phase in the long -running “sale” of Hulu has come to and end — but it’s unlikely this deadline will bring about a sale any quicker than previous ones did.

Silver Lake is known for its investments in high-profile technology companies like Skype and Groupon as well as for a growing interest in the clean energy sector. But the firm has also been stepping up its presence in the media space. Last year, Silver Lake bought a reported 31 percent stake in Ari Emanuel’s William Morris Endeavour agency, with a specific focus on digital initiatives.

Habiger brings an interesting background to the table for Silver Lake. Before NDS, he was the CEO at Sonic Solutions, where he oversaw the transition from a software-based business to one focused on premium online video. Sonic Solutions ran Cinemanow, one of the first transactional video-on-demand platforms, and ended up powering the premium video offerings of companies like Blockbuster and Best Buy. Sonic Solutions eventually got bought by Rovi for $775 million.

NDS, on the other hand, has been focused on the other end of the premium video market: cable, satellite and IPTV service providers. But despite working with legacy distribution businesses, the company also looked to innovate through targeted advertising, advanced programming guides and more. Cisco picked up NDS for $5 billion last year, and Habiger left the company when the deal closed.

Having worked in both worlds — over-the-top and traditional pay TV — gives Habiger a unique perspective on some of the key challenges the media business is facing. Many in the industry believe that the big technological problems with regards to digital content distribution have been solved. What’s left are questions around content rights and business models. Addressing these is going to require a lot of capital. Silver Lake’s appointment of Habiger could be a sign that the firm is seeing an opportunity to profit from this process.

Check out this interview I did with Habiger back in 2010 when he was still CEO of Sonic Solutions:

The story, which appeared today on Bloomberg, says that the three have already contacted Yahoo and its advisers.

But the discussions are only at an early stage and may never materialize as an actual joint deal. And if it does, it could open a can of worms over foreign ownership of a U.S. communications company, and that might halt the bid.

Bloomberg cited three unnamed people close to the situation as sources for its story. AllThingsD also named the three companies in a list of potential bidders in a post two weeks ago.

Alibaba’s chairman Jack Ma has made no secret of his interest in Yahoo: the two companies are already tied up in China, where Yahoo owns a 40-percent stake in the e-commerce giant. The report today speculates that Alibaba’s interest might partly be down to Ma wanting to get back complete control of his own company.

But that’s not the only pre-existing tie between these four companies. Silver Lake and DST are also currently investing in Alibaba — that deal, for an undisclosed amount, also includes Chinese VC, Yunfeng Capital, as well as Singapore’s Temasek as investors. The investment was announced last month and is currently closing.

Another source noted that Silver Lake’s hope would be to sell off all of Yahoo’s Asian assets (it also has an Internet JV with Softbank in Japan) in order to focus the business better in the U.S. for a potential buyer.

If these three actually end up buying Yahoo, it could catapult the company — which has seen better days and has found it a challenge competing against Google (NSDQ: GOOG) in search and its main revenue driver, online advertising — into potentially different tie-ups with a new set of companies. Silver Lake counts Groupon, Skype and Zynga among its investments (the Skype stake is currently being sold to Microsoft; (NSDQ: MSFT) that deal has not closed). Meanwhile, DST also invests in Groupon and Zynga, as well as being a large stakeholder in Facebook and Spotify.

But even if a deal involving Alibaba, DST and Silver Lake makes financial sense for Yahoo — the company fired its CEO last month and says it is exploring strategic options for the business — it could get scuppered by regulators unhappy with the idea of foreign ownership of a major internet company. Yahoo is the second-largest search engine in the U.S. and provides a range of communications services such as email and messaging. Companies like Huawei have been met with roadblocks in the past when trying to acquire U.S.-based equipment makers.

Yahoo, which currently has a market value of $17.1 billion, could be a great deal for the three companies although from the perspective of Yahoo, the best time for getting bought may have passed. When Microsoft tried to buy in the company in 2008, it made an offer of $47.5 billion.

In a release, Focus Media says that selling the stake will let it concentrate on its core businesses, which include an in-store ad network and movie theater ad network.

The company had tried to spin off the Allyes business via an IPO two years ago but pulled those plans when the market collapsed. Reports at the time said that the IPO might value Allyes at $1 billion-plus.

Silver Lake and Warburg Pincus funds are teaming for a $33.86-a-share acquisition totalling $3.4 billion. If that’s an eyebrow-raiser, well Pearson says the pair have “fully committed financing” comprising of the buyers’ own equity plus debt financing from an all-star line-up of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays Bank PLC, Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC and UBS Investment Bank. Who says the banks don’t have money to spend anymore?

Why’s Pearson selling?

The publishing group owns Financial Times and Penguin Books but the biggest part of its business is its education services. Pearson, which owns 61 percent of IDC, says the deal gives it $2 billion and it “intends to use the proceeds of the sale to accelerate the expansion of its businesses, including through bolt-on acquisitions, with a particular focus on adding complementary technology and services to its international, consumer and professional education businesses”.

IDC was housed in Pearson’s FT Group, of whose sales it comprised over half. That it hasn’t been leveraged more through the FT may seem strange. The FT itself has done a few small acquisitions in the financial analysis space over the last year. But the deal lets Pearson concentrate on its core education business. Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino: “This transaction will give both companies greater focus and opportunity to invest more in their strong market positions.”

IDC made £484 million in sales in 2009 and forecast $810 million to $830 million for 2010. IDC is nearly four times more profitable than the FT itself, making up £148 million of FT Group’s £187 million 2009 operating profit. It contributed £55 million to Pearson’s reported earnings.

On the balance sheet, Skype has $50 million in cash (the same amount as the debt financing from eBay), $37.5 million in accounts receivable and roughly $1.9 billion in goodwill. That’s against the $2 billion in liabilities, included deferred revenue and customer advances of $134 million, and shareholder equity (mostly the latter) picked up by the VoIP provider in the move. Ebay estimates the fair value of its 30 percent of Skype at $708.7 million — and its coffers have swelled by $1.8 billion, the amount left from the actual $1,916,633 paid by the investment group after the financing is accounted for, to more than $4.3 billion. The deal was valued at $2.75 billion.

The sale comes six months after eBay announced it would spin off the company, which it acquired for an astonishing $2.6 billion in 2005. But the risk never quite paid off, casting a shadow on Meg Whitman’s tenure at the head of eBay. EBay wrote down the deal by $1.43 billion in 2007; at the same time, Zennström left as CEO to work on expensive, ill-fated Joost. The deal press release effectively skips Skype’s founding and focuses on the fixes since John Donahoe became CEO of eBay and appointed Josh Silverman to head Skype. Revenues rose 44 percent to $551 million in 2008.

The deal has yet to close but Skype is already proclaiming a “new chapter.” In a blog post, Silverman talks about going independent once again — and back to the future, with the involvement of some of Skype’s earliest board members Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer. “It means we