Hulu Launches Private Beta, Makes Very Good First Impressions

Last March NBC Universal and News Corporation announced a joint venture that we initially thought would result in a direct competitor to YouTube. As details emerged, it became clear that the two media conglomerates were not planning a video sharing website for user generated content but rather an online distribution channel for premium video content, including TV shows, movies, and short clips.

In the months following the companies’ initial press release, we gave the joint venture a lot of grief for failing to pick a name for the project, eventually settling on a name – Hulu – that meant “cease” and “desist” in Swahili, copying Google’s mission statement, and receiving not the greatest vote of confidence from NBC Universal’s own chief digital officer.

Behind all of this criticism was a high degree of doubt that NBC and News Corp. were ever going to get Hulu out the door before the joint venture became irrelevant. In September, NBC had even announced a video downloading service that appeared to cannibalize its own joint venture with News Corp. However, this past week Hulu confirmed that it would indeed hit its self-imposed October deadline by launching in private beta on Monday, October 29th. And this past Friday, CEO Jason Kilar and other Hulu representatives demonstrated the new service to us.

While we have not been able to try out the private beta ourselves yet, I was very impressed by the preview of Hulu’s interface and the bulk of its features. Before going into my thoughts about the website, however, I should get some of the many details about Hulu on the table, especially since it’s been months since the original announcement.

Hulu is still a joint venture exclusively between NBC Universal and News Corporation. It exists as a website through which users can stream a collection of TV shows, movies, and short clips on-demand for free without any limits on how many times you can view each video. Hulu also exists as a distribution network of premium content for several partner websites – AOL, MSN, MySpace, Comcast, and Yahoo – that will display Hulu’s videos for free but in their own branded players. In addition to these partnerships, users themselves form a viral distribution network of sorts since Hulu allows its videos to be embedded in any website and shared via email. Hulu makes money in all cases from advertising, which it displays in and around the videos it serves. I’ll go more into the details of embedding and advertising later on.