We are fortunate to have collectively built a culture that matters, a brand that matters, a business that matters. It is impossible to state in words how much this team means to me, how much Hulu means to me.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Hulu is about the shows, not the networks. The shows are the brands that users care about.
We saw Hulu as an opportunity to broaden our audience for ABC content.
When we launched Hulu, everybody was saying, 'Oh, this is going to be a substitute for pay TV in the living room.'
Imagine you're watching '30 Rock' and an ad comes on, but you don't like it. With Hulu Ad Swap, you can actually click the button and trade out the ad. So for the first time ever, a consumer is in control of their ad experience. For us, it's a big win because users are able to take control of what they see.
At a macro level, it's balancing the needs of consumers, advertisers and content owners. And if you talk to any one of those three customer sets in isolation, often times you won't delight the other two. So the hurdle we faced with Hulu Plus was, how can we thread this needle in a way that delights all three customer sets?
Now we live in this DVD, iTunes, Hulu age, and show creators and networks are realizing that and letting shows develop on those terms rather than 'We gotta just punch it week to week, man.' Now they're like, 'What will happen if someone watches the entire show?'
The one thing that's important to know is Hulu's not looking for traffic to be sent to hulu.com from its relationships with Yahoo and Fancast and MSN.
The futures of Crackle and Hulu and so forth become more and more important as we connect to more and more devices. We need our content to make our services as attractive as Apple's or Amazon's or Microsoft's. We're in a brave new world of fierce competition.
We're simple-minded, the team at Hulu, which is, we think if we can obsess over quality and build a better mousetrap, that good things will happen. Users will adopt the service, advertisers will see great value in it, and that's what we're seeing.
Some estimate Hulu IPO could bring in $2 billion. What will the content providers get? Zero. What is Hulu without content? An empty jukebox.