Hulu, Screw You.
Big Media conglomerates NBC and Fox just don’t understand that the key to success in online video is niche media, not Even Bigger Media. That’s why it’s a bad idea for them to enter a joint venture for their video site, when each of them is technically capable of hosting and superdistributing their own content. They even gave their joint venture a stupid name: Hulu.
Six years ago, two Big Media conglomerates in my country had the same idea. They thought the key to online success was Even Bigger Media. They formed an online joint venture, hoping to create a top-down online media monolith from On High. Do you know what happened to that joint venture? It fell apart. Violently. The same fate awaits Hulu.
YouTube succeeds because it serves all niches. Wallstrip succeeds because it serves a particular niche. By contrast, Hulu wants to help you “find and enjoy the world’s premier content.” That mission statement implies that NBC and Fox content, tuned for a mass audience, are “the world’s premier content.” That sort of presumption and preselection is useless in a search-powered video world where people can find exactly what they want to watch, not what some company wants them to watch.
Media joint ventures made a lot of sense before the Internet, when such ventures increased physical collaboration and distribution capabilities. On the Internet, media joint ventures are pointless because physical collaboration and distribution are non-issues. Two old media titans pulling together will simply pull each other down with convoluted ownership issues and decision-making debacles.
Hulu is a bunch of executives doing what works inside offline video and hoping it’ll work inside online video, without recognizing the most basic differences between the two media. Hulu, screw you.
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POSTED IN: Television
6 opinions for Hulu, Screw You.
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Sep 2, 2007 at 3:30 am
[…] Of course, this means iTunes users who would have otherwise legally paid for Heroes episodes will now either download illegally or buy competing shows. Nice work leaving money on the table, Zucker. Good luck selling five-buck episodes on Hulu. […]
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Oct 6, 2007 at 6:45 am
[…] expected, NBC-Fox online video joint venture Hulu is losing steam before it even starts. NBC Universal and […]
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Oct 15, 2007 at 7:15 am
[…] This video also explains Yahoo’s defeat by Google in the search arena: the folly of applying offline assumptions to online business. Even today, some big businesses still make those boneheaded assumptions: witness the NBC-Fox clunker Hulu. […]
NBC Kills Own YouTube Channel
Oct 22, 2007 at 7:26 am
[…] Now they’ve deleted their entire YouTube channel, presumably to take the videos into their wannabe-hip content graveyard Hulu. Yes, even the massive YouTube-propelled success of Dick in a Box didn’t get through to those […]
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Oct 29, 2007 at 11:02 am
[…] expected Hulu to get bogged down by all sorts of crazy corporate content restrictions. Guess what? I was […]
The Search Insider » Blog Archive » Hey, Hulu…I want my MTV.
Apr 2, 2008 at 6:02 pm
[…] any rate, Hulu has gone under attack in the blogosphere for countless reasons, some of which I think are semi-legitimate (how can it […]
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