[SllX]

Looks straight forward. I’m unfamiliar with Ohio specifically but the article lays it out: they’re subject to the State’s sales tax.

This, Hulu and Netflix argue, is a mutually exclusive tax with the franchise fee that the municipality wants to levy, a tax specifically targeted at cable companies that actually lay cable and therefore the State would actually lose money if they were reclassified from their current business status under State law.

It makes sense, and this does look like a money-grab. It can pay for its infrastructure out of its share of sales tax revenue or whatever other sources of revenue they have, raise those, or levy a new tax that specifically targets the type of business Ohio apparently classifies Hulu and Netflix to be under their State’s laws: a “specified digital products”, whatever that means, but I’m betting they don’t want to because doing so would hit more than Netflix and Hulu and bring more big players into the political fight.