Hulu Continues To Wobble Along That Fine Line Between Success And Failure As CEO Bails

from the looking-kind-of-bad dept

If one were to make a short list of the top great ideas that were implimented horribly, unbelievably wrong, Hulu would have to be somewhere between The View and the United Nations (I'll let you decide what goes where, exactly). Hulu was the once promising entertainment venture that has ugly-morphed its way into a mere excuse for entertainment studios to claim they offer people what they want. All the while there's been some discussion about whether or not the studios that own Hulu are purposefully trying to tank it to keep people from cutting the cable cord. And throughout all of this, Hulu has never really caught on with the same kind of fevered pitch as Netflix or even Amazon for streaming service customers.

Reader Vidiot writes in about a Business Insider piece detailing all the reasons why Hulu may have one foot in the grave and the other foot hovering just over it. Amongst the less-than-awesome facts on Hulu's list are items such as a new request for $200 Million from investors, reported losses of $30 Million per quarter, and that Hulu is trying to compete against Netflix while spending one-tenth the money on original content and one-ninth the paid subscriber base. The article announces that because of all that, it's time to conclude that Hulu is a failure, but don't blame corporate leadership.

The fact is (CEO Jason) Kilar had an almost impossible job from the very beginning. Hulu doesn't own the content it distributes, so it only gets to keep a small portion of its revenues. Hulu is, in fact, owned by the companies that own said content. And those owners have little incentive to create healthy margins for Hulu at the expense of their own. The fact is, Kilar has, in a couple years, built a Web brand that you have heard of. Yes, this was done on the back of free TV and a big marketing budget. But it's still decently impressive.

I'm not sure how we went from failure to impressive in less than a hundred words (which is impressive, by the by), but I am sympathetic to Hulu's raw deal from the studios that own it -- something Mike has been pointing out for nearly four years. That said, I don't think Hulu is a failure that is so far failed that it can't be brought back from fail-dom. After all, I've heard that Justin Timberlake is taking some time away from bringing sexy back to work on bringing Myspace back and if that mess of a social network can rise from the internet grave, Hulu can too.

But whoever is going to try to bring Hulu back from the prep-coffin, it appears it isn't going to be the afore mentioned Jason Kilar, because he's decided to bail. By all accounts, Kilar tried, really tried to make this thing work, but despite some successes it's not wrong to say that Hulu hasn't turned out to be what some folks thought it would. Given the raw deal that Hulu has gotten, the conflicts of interest heading up the company, I don't blame Kilar one bit for leaving. Hulu needs to innovate despite its issues, or else we can get the funeral march going.

Filed Under: jason kilar, ownership, videos
Companies: hulu

Hulu CEO So Careful Not To Upset Cable Companies, He Might Just Destroy His Own Business

from the nice-work! dept

A year and a half ago we questioned whether or not Hulu could really survive, given the rock and a hard place situation it had put itself in by being owned by the content rights holders, who wanted to limit what Hulu could do in competing against the rest of the online world. This limitation by its owners was quite obvious in the recently released subscription package that felt wanting.

Now, Hulu's CEO, Jason Kilar -- who, it should be noted, has always appeared to fight for consumer interests against the demands of Hulu's owners -- has come out and said, quite clearly, that Hulu is not trying to "kill" cable. In other words, he's signaling to the world quite blatantly: Hulu is unable to do the one thing it needs to do to be a successful business.

If Hulu were a truly independent business, the main focus of that business would be to flat-out disrupt the monopoly cable TV business. That's a huge opportunity. But, of course, Hulu's owners don't want that, because they're in this neat symbiotic relationship with the cable companies, where those cable companies keep paying more and more money to the TV companies just to carry their shows. So they don't want to upset that business model -- even if it's incredibly anti-consumer. So, because of that, Hulu can't do the one thing it needs to do. It's telling, by the way, that the only people in our comments, who thought that Hulu's subscription offering was a good deal, were those who had or were planning to ditch cable. And here comes Hulu admitting that it's not designed to help those people. Yikes.

Filed Under: cable, internet, jason kilar, strategy, tv
Companies: hulu