Hulu spurs Web video hullabaloo
Posted on Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Arrested Development was canceled by Fox in 2006, but the show is very popular on the Web site Hulu. Justine Bateman was a guest star on the show in this 2005 episode with series star Jason Bateman.
In the Wild West that is online video, Hulu (www.hulu.com) has proved to be a trailblazing answer to how professional content can thrive on the Web.
"This is period of great experimentation in regard to media, in regard to online video," says Hulu Chief Executive Officer Jason Kilar. "You've seen a lot, you're probably going to see even more in terms of various business models, various interface designs."
Hulu officially launched March 12, a result of the unlikely collaboration between News Corp. and NBC Universal. Normally, such corporate fusion in new mediums doesn't pan out.
Web loggers were, to say the least, doubtful. Before its name was announced, bloggers derided the project as "Clown Co."
"Boy, did we have to eat crow," wrote Michael Arrington of the influential blog Techcrunch.com. He added: "I was wrong. Hulu rocks. Despite ridiculous odds, the company was able to pull off a joint venture between two humongous parent media companies and provides users with a compelling, sexy product."
Hulu hosts more than 1,000 shows, from Family Guy to Saturday Night Live. There are more than 130 providers, not only NBC and Fox, but Columbia Pictures Television, MGM, Lionsgate, Paramount and PBS. The site's database of full-length films also has grown.
ComScore, a marketing research company, pegged Hulu's unique monthly visitors for October at 24 million. On average, a visitor watches 10 videos on Hulu in a month, which is good enough to chart Hulu sixth in videos viewed online.
That only garners Hulu about 2 percent of the online video market, far below the leading Google sites - of which Google's You-Tube is the big draw. But many believe Hulu is more appealing to advertisers than YouTube, and that Hulu's ad revenues could equal YouTube's by the end of this year. (Hulu representatives decline to share revenue figures, but say they finished above internal estimates for the year.)
Previously Internet-shy content providers - notably the TV networks - seem to have embraced the Hulu model. The Viacom-owned CBS.com (www.cbs. com) recently relaunched in a design very similar to Hulu's clean, white interface and user-friendly functionality.
"The whole tenor of the conversation is markedly different, in terms of folks like Sony and MGM and Warner Bros. really coming on board once they realized what it was we were building," Kilar said.
Not everyone is on board, though. At the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in early December, Discovery Communications Chief Executive Officer David Zaslav said his networks would not be putting their long-form content online.
But while Kilar doesn't pretend Hulu and its new model are yet fully formed, 2008 was in many ways a banner year for professionally created online video.
One of the year's biggest hits was Joss Whedon's three-part musical Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog (on Hulu). Saturday Night Live clips were enormously popular online thanks to Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impression (also on Hulu). And other sites like FunnyOrDie.com and Strike.TV were pipelines for Hollywood pros to try their hands at Web videos.
"Based on the folks that are working with us today, the response I get is what Hulu is delivering for them ... much more than they ever thought it would do in 2008," Kilar said. "We're quite bullish about where this goes."
It's interesting what shows are most popular on Hulu. Heroes and House, for example, rank below cult comedies It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (FX) and Arrested Development (canceled by Fox in 2006).
"It's a great theoretical: If Arrested Development were on the air today, would they have canceled it?" Kilar asks. "My own personal opinion is no, given the fact it's our second-most popular show of all time."
This year, Hulu hopes to expand internationally, but rights issues - often different by country - have made such expansion a thorny prospect.
Kilar also hopes to make Hulu more broadly syndicated across the Web. "If we can do it in a professional way, we'd love to be a part of MSN [msn.com], of IMDB [Internet Movie Database, www. imdb.com], of Yahoo and a number of other sites," Kilar said.
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