Hulu's sharing tools, TV shows help it win online video fans
LOS ANGELES -- Hulu CEO Jason Kilar could give you a whole list of reasons his "premium" video site has seen such stunning growth, but the sharing tools would have to top it.
TV shows such as Family Guy and Saturday Night Live appear in their full and uncut glory on Hulu, and also get widely shared on blogs and websites via simple embedding tools and e-mail links. Even Kilar wasn't sure his NBC and 20th Century Fox bosses would go for it.
"The assumption was that they would say no," Kilar says. "But there was no hesitation."
The Hulu service launched just a year ago and is the sixth-most-viewed online video channel, bypassing more established sites Veoh, Joost and Fancast, according to market tracker Nielsen Online.
"If you want to be of the Net, it's all about sharing and the community, and critically important that it's not just about Hulu," Kilar says. "We know that far more people will go to more other websites on any given day than come to Hulu."
Monthly traffic figures are few, since Hulu has been around for such a short time. But the service showed nearly 150 million video streams in September, over one-third more than August's 107 million streams, according to Nielsen.
While that's a fraction of YouTube's 5.3 billion September video streams, Hulu clearly is onto something.
Kilar increased Hulu's visibility by cutting deals with big distributors such as Yahoo, MySpace and MSN. Fans can watch one of over 1,000 TV shows or movies, mostly from the Fox and NBC libraries, along with a handful of cable channels, including Comedy Central.
Two big omissions: CBS and ABC.
Kilar says he hopes to come to terms with both networks, which have deals with competing video services including Veoh, Fancast and AOL. In the meantime, he's made it easy for Hulu users to find those shows by adding links to CBS and ABC shows in Hulu searches.
"I think this is brilliant," says Allen Weiner, an analyst at Gartner. "Hulu links to CBS and ABC, even though it doesn't have anything to gain from it. That's a very significant development, and says a lot about Hulu's approach to customers."
Hulu also has a "channel" on YouTube to showcase short clips, mostly from Family Guy and The Simpsons. Its full-length "premium" content doesn't belong there because YouTube mostly features user-generated amateur video, says J.B. Perrette, NBC Universal's president of digital distribution. (YouTube also has been making a push to premium content, with full shows from CBS and full-length independent movies.)
"The professional content is such a minority on YouTube, it's hard for it to surface in the right way," Perrette says.
Word-of-mouth growth
Indeed, NBC Universal and Fox parent News Corp. nws formed Hulu in reaction to the unauthorized appearance on YouTube of clips from Family Guy and other shows, as fans posted clips from homemade recordings.
Another major studio, Viacom, sued YouTube-owner Google over unauthorized clips from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and other shows. The $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit has yet to go to trial.
Like YouTube, a Silicon Valley start-up that began its life above a San Bruno, Calif., pizza parlor, Hulu isn't in the heart of Hollywood, but on the west side of L.A., in an office complex. Kilar has two main teams, one here, the other in Beijing.
Assessing Hulu's early success, Kilar says the service is simple to use, has sharper audio and video than YouTube, and focuses intensely on customer service. "We spend hours on things like making sure searches for shows return results in chronological order," he says. "We think things like that make a really big difference."
Dan Fawcett, president of Fox's digital media division, says Fox and NBC were "surprised" by Hulu's rapid growth. He says Fox anticipated that by now Hulu would be spending money on marketing, but that hasn't been needed. "It's all been via word of mouth."