Sounds pretty popular, and haven't read all of the thread, so what am I asking to be invited to? Not a daisy chain is it? rashmonk@gmail.com
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fort...17/104326604/index.htm?postversion=2008030816 A new way to watch TV Watch out YouTube. Two old-media dinosaurs, Fox and NBC Universal, have created one cool venue for their hottest shows. By David Kirkpatrick and Adam Lashinsky (Fortune Magazine) -- When Fox and NBC Universal announced last March that they would join forces to put their TV shows online, the pundits of Silicon Valley howled with derision. Old media doesn't get the Internet, they said. Michael Arrington, the influential editor of TechCrunch, rattled off the reasons the project would never succeed and suggested that Fox and NBC quickly name their joint venture before it got stuck with the moniker insiders at Google had reportedly given it: Clown Co. So there was huge relief at Hulu, as the company is now called, when it previewed an early version in late October and the first reviews started coming in. The very people who had thrown brickbats were now tossing raves. "In one word: brilliant," wrote blogger Om Malik. Even Arrington declared himself "very impressed." Hulu CEO Jason Kilar calls that the company's "defining moment." Says Peter Chernin, president of News Corp. (NWS, Fortune 500), which owns Fox: "They said big media was too stupid to do anything appropriate on the web, and that NBC and Fox were incapable of partnering. Both charges have been wrong from day one." Whether or not that's true, the world will soon judge for itself. After one year and an estimated $15 million worth of development costs, Hulu, a video website supported by advertising, is set to debut in early March. A project that is the TV and film industries' best effort so far to carve a place for themselves in the rapidly changing world of digital media is about to have its first major screen test. Life used to be simple for media giants like NBC (GE, Fortune 500) and Fox. They produced content, the public consumed it, and advertising and ticket sales generated gushers of profits. Today viewers have their choice of all sorts of venues - digital and analog, legal and illegal - from Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) to Netflix (NFLX) (see table). Some of the most popular videos are the ones viewers produce themselves and post for free on YouTube. Into this shifting landscape was born the project that would become Hulu - a made-up word that happens to sound like Chinese for "interactive recording." It was early 2006, and everybody in Hollywood was afraid the Internet would do to video what Napster had done to music. Indeed, a lively trade in pirated TV shows had already begun. Sure, some online outfits were willing to pay for access to high-quality programming. The problem, says NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker, was that "nobody was willing to pay us what we thought it was worth." Fox's Chernin and NBC's Zucker had independently concluded that the TV industry needed its own website - one that would provide a convenient and legal venue for its content while capturing some of the ad dollars that were shifting online. The idea gained more urgency in the fall of '06, when Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) bought YouTube for $1.6 billion. The two began seeking industry partners; Viacom (VIA) almost joined before CEO Tom Freston was ousted in late 2006. Reluctantly, Chernin and Zucker decided to proceed alone. Money, it turned out, was not an object for Hulu. In May, Providence Equity Partners offered a cool $100 million for a 10% stake - giving the nascent operation an astonishing valuation of $1 billion. But the secret of Hulu's initial success - the thing that made believers out of the skeptics - is the power and simplicity of the website itself. Hulu's creators focused with almost obsessive attention to detail on the user's experience. The first thing you see when you visit Hulu is a big screen offering a TV clip with a prominent "watch now" button. You can scroll through a half-dozen of these featured offerings, browse the most popular episodes, or search shows by name - from vintage NBC series like McHale's Navy to the latest episode of Fox's The Simpsons. Hulu even lets you search for competitors' content, like ABC's Desperate Housewives. "If it's legally available anywhere on the web, we want to take you to it," says Kilar. Much of what's right about Hulu can be traced directly to Kilar, a tech industry veteran who worked at Amazon for nine years. The first thing Kilar did when he was brought onboard as CEO last July was to declare in ways large and small his independence from his corporate parents. He promptly abandoned the palatial corner office he'd been assigned in Santa Monica for a near cubicle. "We asked ourselves, 'If we were starting this in a garage, what would we need to be successful?'" Superb software was one answer. Kilar's first hire was friend and former Microsoft engineer Eric Feng. Together they assembled two technical teams - one in Santa Monica and the other in Beijing, where Feng had come to know some of the most talented programmers in Microsoft's Chinese research lab. It was a classic transpacific skunkworks operation. Each night the U.S. team sent specs to the team in Beijing, which had code ready for the Californians when they got back to work the next day. The result is the elegantly transparent interface that has wowed even its biggest detractors. Greg Smith of Ogilvy & Mather says he watches more video on Hulu than TV now. "It's just simple," he says. "But TV is simple too. That's the genius of it." Like TV, there are ads on Hulu, although the site - or any online TV service - is a long way from matching the massive revenue of broadcast television. Hulu shows only one-quarter as many ads - two minutes for every 22 minutes of content, as opposed to eight on TV. And while its ad rates are actually higher per viewer than primetime's, it has vastly fewer viewers. (On the other hand, you can't fast-forward through ads, which marketers appreciate.) Hulu also gives viewers controls that don't appear on any TV set - controls that play into today's "mash-up" culture. For instance, Hulu lets you edit shows down to a clip as short as a few seconds - only Jay Leno's first joke, perhaps. You can e-mail a link to that clip or embed it - or the full show for that matter - directly into another website. The drama surrounding Hulu's launch heated up last August when NBC abruptly pulled its content off the Apple iTunes store - where NBC shows like The Office and 30 Rock had accounted for 30% to 40% of iTunes' video downloads. "Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content," Zucker later complained. Zucker may yet come to terms with iTunes. Meanwhile, he's happy to showcase his hit series on Hulu and Amazon's iTunes competitor, Unbox. Impressive as it is, Hulu will to have fight hard to stay relevant. "It will be big," says David Verklin, CEO of Carat Americas, one of the U.S.'s top five ad buyers. "But it's a transitional technology." The immediate challenge will be for Hulu to expand its offerings. In the past six months it has signed on a couple of important partners, chief among them MGM and Sony. Viacom executives hint that they may join soon, and Chernin says promising talks are underway with Time Warner. But Quincy Smith, who heads digital initiatives at CBS, speaks for many when he expresses his ambivalence. On the one hand, Hulu's vision strikes him as too narrow. "If the web is just another way to watch TV, I think I'm going to slit my wrists," he says. He thinks Hulu should focus much more on facilitating interaction among the passionate fans who make up the online community. CBS, for instance, encourages viewers to gather after each episode of Survivor to discuss who was voted off the show, and who should have been. Kilar - whom Smith says calls him almost daily trying to recruit CBS - insists that such things are on the drawing board. But even if Hulu gets them right, Smith is unlikely to share as much of the ad revenue as Kilar wants. (Hulu has asked some potential partners for as much as 30%.) Says Smith: "The economics have to change." They probably will, if that's what it takes to make Hulu - or something like it - succeed. For Hollywood and the TV industry, there's too much at stake.
Hulu is now open to everyone. No invitations needed now. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/b...&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss&oref=slogin Testing Over, Hulu.com to Open Its TV and Film Offerings This Week By BRAD STONE Published: March 11, 2008 SAN FRANCISCO — Hulu.com, the long-gestating Internet joint venture between NBC Universal and Fox, emerges from limited testing on Wednesday to make its catalog of TV shows and video clips available to anyone on the Web. The streaming-video site displays free, ad-supported shows and feature films from NBC, Fox and more than 50 media companies, including Sony Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. On Wednesday, Hulu is also planning to announce that the Warner Brothers Television Group and Lionsgate will add content from their libraries. Hulu will also give sports fans highlights from N.B.A. and N.H.L. games, and full-length N.C.A.A. men’s basketball games from the last 25 years, the company said. Hulu’s videos also appear on AOL, MSN, Comcast, MySpace and Yahoo. Over 5,000 Web sites have embedded clips from Hulu, the company said. Hulu has so far failed to recruit two major television networks, ABC, a division of Walt Disney, and CBS. Jason Kilar, Hulu’s chief executive, said that he was still having regular conversations with executives at the two networks. But even without them, he said, the company has quadrupled the number of show titles in its library since testing began. “We won’t stop until we have everything in terms of premium content. That is our mission,” he said. “I just think back to the fact that 24 months ago, there wasn’t anything online legally in terms of full TV episodes or films. In just 17 weeks, we have gone from nothing to over 200 premium titles.” NBC Universal, a division of General Electric, and Fox, a division of the News Corporation, announced their joint venture to much fanfare nearly a year ago. The then-unnamed company was at first viewed skeptically by many in the industry as a desperate attempt to keep up with the Google’s YouTube, the dominant player in online video. Recently, Hulu has received high marks from media and Web executives for creating an easy to use site with high-quality video and professional content attractive to advertisers. Hulu has been in a password-protected testing period since October, but has slowly been inviting users to enter the site. Mr. Kilar said that more than five million viewers have watched Hulu videos in the last 30 days, and that 80 percent of the shows on the site are viewed at least once a week. Hulu is experimenting with giving viewers a choice in advertising. During certain shows, viewers will be able to choose which commercial they want to watch — for example, whether they want to see an ad for Nissan’s Rogue S.U.V., Maxima sedan or Z sports car. Some viewers will also be given the opportunity to watch a two-minute film preview before a TV show, and then skip all the other advertising breaks. One challenge Hulu faces is building a predictable and stable library of content. To protect DVD and Web download sales, media companies often make TV shows and films available free on the Web for certain periods of time and then remove them. For example, there are 11 episodes of the TV show “24” on Hulu — beginning with episode 18 of the first season. “If those episodes keep disappearing, they are going to have trouble getting people to go back and recommend TV shows on Hulu to their friends,” said Bobby Tulsiani, an analyst at JupiterResearch.
I still don't like their interface. Like if I'm watching SNL clips, I wish that the list wouldn't reset back to the default beginning everytime I start one. It makes it a pain in the ass to go back and click past 10 pages to get back to where you were on the list pane.
