LOS ANGELES — Jesse Jacobs, president of the Chernin Group, felt defeated.

It was July 12, 2013, and Mr. Jacobs had just found out that a crucial deal — the independent media company’s proposed purchase of Hulu, in partnership with AT&T — had collapsed. Hulu’s owners had decided not to sell after all.

“It was like Lucy pulling up the football from Charlie Brown at the last second,” Mr. Jacobs said.

Still convinced that streaming services like Hulu were Hollywood’s future, Mr. Jacobs and his boss, the longtime media executive Peter Chernin, started acquisition talks the next day with Crunchyroll, a little-known streamer of anime videos. They bought it for $75 million, nurtured it, added other new media start-ups around it in a holding company called Otter Media — and sold the collection to AT&T on Tuesday. Analysts valued the deal, which had long been expected, at more than $1 billion.

With the purchase, Otter Media ranks as one of the most valuable media upstarts of the last decade, said Brett Sappington, senior director of research at Parks Associates, a firm that focuses on emerging consumer technology. Others include Twitch, which streams video game sessions and was sold to Amazon for $970 million in 2014.

“Otter is certainly a win,” Mr. Sappington said, noting that other new media companies have imploded — the most recent being AwesomenessTV, which was valued at $650 million in 2016 and sold to Viacom last month for about $50 million. “The challenge ahead for Otter is staying hot,” he added. “It’s not easy, as we just saw with Awesomeness.”