Top Ten Facts about Hulu the Emerging ‘YouTube Killer’
Video social networking competition has always been very colorful but most of us stop discovering other video social networking sites and settle with YouTube. ‘YouTube and its rivals’ include Metacafe, VideoJug (the how to video site), Revver, Bebo TV, and so on and so forth. And it famously does not include Google Video, now treated as an undervalued old actress amongst video sites, or Blinkx. Now there is also Joost for sharing things but I would not call it a video social networking site. Why Joost is again something different is that it does not deal with user generated content, user uploads. Quite on the contrary, it aims to inherit the total officiality of TV having contracts with content providors to get ‘clear and crisp materials’ not the usual illegal and/or low quality recordings we quite often find on YouTube (and which I even like sometimes, strange as it may sound).
Hulu video services come from NBC and Fox Interactive Media (private beta) and as Greg Verdino points out the news came from the unknown part of the blogosphere packed with newbies like Jonathan Burg “who, in addition to breaking the news, snagged an interview with hulu’s official spokesperson.”
So here comes Hulu in a quickview:
1, Hulu was founded in March 2007 (previously dubbed NewCo and ClownCo)
2, Their aim is to provide quality video content.
3, Hulu is a joint venture: News Corp. & NBC
4, The CEO of Hulu is 36-year old Jason Kilar who used to be a key executive at Amazon.com from 1997 to 2006.
5, Hulu launches beta testing in October 2007 (you can register here)
6, AOL, CNET, Comcast, MSN, MySpace, Yahoo will act as distribution partner sites thus reaching “98 percent of the monthly U.S. unique users on the Internet”
7, The USA Network unit of NBC also owns the video site called Didja.com , which aims to profit from providing entertaining video ads from 2008.
8, Hulu’s name is unnecessarily explained as ‘inherently fun’ by the CEO. (Sorry, but what makes something funny and playful if it is explained that it is funny?)
9, You must be 13 years or older to use the Site.
10, Hulu will not be totally ad-funded: Hulu reserves the right at any time to charge fees for access to portions of the Site or the Site as a whole