Hulu was already being constructed when they were recalling shifting into making their own products

Hulu has been around for a very long time (it’s also part of why their UI sucks ass while being owned by Disney. It’s the same UI they’ve had for years) they just didn’t fully invest in the marketing and content until Netflix proved to C-Suites how viable a streaming service actually was

It was launched on October 29, 2007, initially as a joint venture between News Corporation (later 21st Century Fox) and NBC Universal (later bought by Comcast), Providence Equity, and later The Walt Disney Company, serving as an aggregation of recent episodes of television series from their respective television broadcasting. In 2010, Hulu launched a subscription service, initially branded as “Hulu Plus”, which featured full seasons of programs from the companies and other partners, and un-delayed access to new episodes. In 2017, the company launched Hulu with Live TV—an over-the-top streaming television service offering access to broadcast television channels.

Wikipedia

Netflix also launched their Internet streaming service in 2007 and in 2011 is when they separated the subscriptions so that the DVD service and the streaming service were different subscriptions, as well as when their first batch of originals/exclusives were released (House of Cards, season 5 of Arrested Development and they were the exclusive North American distributor for the Norwegian TV series Lilyhammer) and it really wasn’t for a few more years before all of the content licensing deals started expiring and being non-renewed, somewhere around 2018ish by my memory.

Since the last decade has been a blur, I’ll just summarize that HBO Max, Paramount+, Discovery+ and Peacock all didn’t launch until the 2020s, meanwhile Disney+ and Apple+ both launched in late 2019, accidentally timing themselves perfectly to grow immensely during the pandemic (and Disney+ was smart in bundling with Hulu since by that point they owned 2/3 of Hulu via their 21st Century Fox acquisition)

So while yes, Hulu probably was a hedge by legacy media companies, they didn’t really invest in it until Netflix already owned the streaming landscape