The market for streaming video is overflowing with new services. That’s good news for binge-watching consumers and a boon for producers and owners of video entertainment.

But this trend could eventually soak streaming-video distributors, who increasingly might find themselves paying escalating prices for exclusive video content in a seller’s market.

The music-streaming subscription service Spotify is the newest well-financed player to wade into digital video. According to the Wall Street Journal, Spotify is in discussions with traditional-media and online-video companies to start a web-video hub. The Journal notes that the initiative “may put growth ahead of profit.”

The video wars are typically presented as pitting “over-the-top” video streamers such as Netflix Inc. (NFLX), Amazon.com (AMZN) and Google Inc.’s (GOOGL, GOOG) YouTube against entrenched pay-TV bundlers such as Comcast Corp. (CMCSA), Walt Disney Co. (DIS) and CBS Corp. (CBS).

Yet the boundaries separating these businesses are blurring, and competition among the unbundled video streaming outfits themselves has become intense, too.

This is perhaps best illustrated by Hulu, the subscription-video service owned by Comcast, Disney and Twenty-First Century Fox Inc. (FOX, FOXA). Once just a repository of back episodes of network TV series, Hulu has had extraordinary growth in viewership and has emerged as an aggressive bidder for exclusive content.

The service grabbed plenty of attention last month when it paid a reported $160 million for the entire 180-episode run of the sitcom “Seinfeld.”

One media analyst who discussed this deal with industry folks at the recent online-media Newfronts advertiser showcase says some were “sticker-shocked” by what Hulu agreed to pay for the show.

Hulu’s owners sought to sell Hulu a few years ago, but pulled the asset off the block in 2013 when bids never rose above a reported $1 billion.

Since then, Hulu has solidified its status as a viable magnet for eyeballs. Subscribership grew 50% last year to 9 million, and hours watched surged even faster, by 83%, with a younger audience than traditional TV commands.

Anthony DiClemente, analyst at Nomura Securities, ballparks Hulu’s market value at $8 billion to $9 billion. He estimates about $850 million in subscription revenue, based on 9 million subs at $8 per month, and figures Hulu had about the same revenue from ads last year. That translates to $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion in revenue. Applying Netflix’s stock multiple of five-times revenue – an aggressive but defensible assumption – he gets to that $8 billion-plus valuation. That, coincidentally, is the valuation Spotify is now seeking in an ongoing private fundraising round.