Time for some Hulu
I’ve been playing around with Hulu, the video site that is the result of a joint venture between NBC and News Corp, for a month now or so and thought it was time to give some thoughts on it.
I like it. I like it very much.
Compared to Joost, which is a terrible user experience where you have trouble finding the (very limited) content that’s there, it’s a revolution.
I would rather describe it as a fancier YouTube, where you can create playlists, comment and review movies in a well designed garden. Love the little javascript animations that enhance the user experience a great deal.
The content is good enough, a dozen of quality series (for example 30rock, Heroes, The Office and House) together with some older content such as Arrested Development, The A-Team (sweet!) and Miami Vice just to name a few, makes for an experience that is really quite good.
Three reasons why Hulu will succeed in one way or another:
Focus: It’s really straight to the point. Just a short description of each series and episode, then straight to the moving content. There is no doubt on where to find episodes and what the site is about. Very unusual in this kind of joint venture between huge corporations, where too many people often have too many ideas.
Distribution: Hulu shouldn’t be viewed as a destination, instead it’s more of a destination arm (To quote Valleywag) for NBC and FOX videos, an example of that is the content partnership with Comcast video site Fancast. They’re not depending on having millions and millions of visitors, but creating a user experience that is great both on Hulu.com and where ever their content is viewed. Currently it has partnership deals with AOL Video, Veoh, MSN Video, MySpace TV and Fancast.
Advertising: What I find is that when the content is as good as it is on Hulu I’m really not disturbed by the advertising. A regular episode (22 minutes) has three 30 seconds ad spots as well as overlay advertising in between. What I’ve seen it’s all been from the same advertiser. It hasn’t been a problem at all, I don’t find it that intrusive and for such quality content I’m totally fine with watching a couple of ads. The problem with video ads to me seems very overrated, sure if I’m watching a 45 second clip on YouTube pre-rolls and post-rolls could be quite annoying, however if I’m watching a great series it’s definitely ok. The problem of monetizing video on the web is more a problem of monetizing short video clips rather than full episodes.
I like the strategy of having all ads included in the video and at the same time focusing on an open distribution strategy for the content, I can embed or share it anyway I prefer. CEO Jason Kilar and the team really seems to have made some great work and went from being a laughingstock when the news of the joint venture was released to being a great site with lots of potential.
Now if it just was accessible from outside the US…
hulu, tv, video, youtube, joost
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