The Hire That Could Save or Destroy a Crumbling Hulu
What's This?
2013-10-24 12:33:56 UTC
This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.
"We are passionate in our opinion that the world has long since exceeded its quota in the mediocrity department. We believe our professional calling is to deliver quality... For Hulu, nothing less than brain-spray awesome quality will do, down to the finest detail."
And so begins Hulu’s genesis document, “What Defines Hulu,” a corporate manifesto of sorts from original CEO, Jason Kilar. To read it now is to look into the dreaminess of a startup adventure so earnest it breaks your heart and such a clear picture of the kind of dog-years toll a digital media company experiences in just six years.
Mike Hopkins, formerly of 21st Century FOX, will take over as Hulu’s CEO from interim Andy Forssell. One can only hope Hopkins has the superpower tenacity that's needed to save the online streaming company we once knew and loved.
Though it poised itself as a scrappy “cord-cutting” underdog fighting the behemoth of cable, Hulu was, of course, born of the joint venture of NewsCorp and NBC to stay just slightly ahead of the curve as bit-torrenting television became increasingly user-friendly. The free Hulu service that launched in 2007 was not simply a stopgap to pad the nuisance of digital viewership; it was an elegant, intuitive, savvy alternative to watch primetime offerings.
A service this pleasurable to use and this viable an alternative was not what the parent corps had ever bargained for, but for the first several years, Hulu gained a loyal and outspoken fan base vociferous enough to launch Hulu into a new tier of service. In 2009, Hulu launched Hulu Plus, its premium subscription at $7.99 per month to offer a wider breadth of content and service on compatible mobile platforms.
"We believe customers will respond to this neurotic focus on quality," says Kilar in the aforementioned document. "We are comfortable knowing that many reasonable people will consider our standards to be too high."
Sadly, these naysayers were slightly closer to home than Hulu’s own staff may have realized. In delivering a growing quality product, it was easy to forget that on its board were two old-school media models concerned far less about a blissful future of digital entertainment than of digital streaming never amounting to a significant threat.
As relations between Hulu’s board strained, Hulu itself, the very mission statement itself—“to help people find and enjoy the world’s premium video content when, where and how they want it”—began to buckle.
Content once available to all Hulu users drifted over to the Plus service. Ad-tailor, Hulu’s unique and theoretically brilliant system for allowing users a degree of customization in their ad experience, failed to make any significant customer-facing developments in two years, resulting in bitter, entitled users who felt that coming across an ad that was not to their liking meant that Hulu was consciously ignoring their input. (This may be the time to mention that Hulu’s Ad SVP from the beginning, JP Colaco, announced his plan to leave Hulu just weeks ago.)
Hulu’s recent compatibility on the Nintendo DS platform may have drawn more attention to its delivery being literally two years late than simply letting an app on the already quaint GameBoy-style platform fizzle out quietly.
While Hulu actually beat Netflix to the punch in original content with charming political comedy Battleground , once the big red swung back with stunningly executed House of Cards , Hulu’s strategy took a bizarre turn: It canceled its highest-rated Hulu Original and diluted its originals with laughably low-quality offerings.
Why Timothy Levitch was resurrected from 16mm 1990s obscurity with a Hulu Original travel show that looks to have been designed by an excitable yearbook committee would ever be pitted as a remote contender against, for example, Jenji Kohen’s breathtakingly subversive Orange Is The New Black on Netflix is baffling.
Stranger still is the way in which Hulu jumped Netflix’s bandwagon of raising old shows back from the dead. In 2013, Netflix brought to life a new season of Arrested Development, a show for which fans still practically hold candlelight vigils following its sudden cancellation in 2006. Despite a tepid reception, fans went to far as to actually watch the show legally rather than pirate it.
From viewing stats during Arrested Development’s release in May of 2013 come unfathomable statements as, “Arrested Development represented 10% of all Netflix traffic on one university network in the U.S.”
The same year, Hulu took an entirely unorthodox strategy in targeting the seemingly least likely candidate for online streaming: soap opera viewers. Despite all doubts to the contrary, soap fans got it together and made the return of One Life To Live and All My Children the top-viewed content on its exclusive platforms, Hulu and iTunes.
What might have been a brilliant sneak-attack strategy to squeeze the last of soap’s dying genre ended up being perceived by many viewers as a bait-and-switch as the production company, Prospect Park, responsible for both soaps reneged on its weekday delivery schedule and reduced it instead to twice per week, leaving Hulu red-faced and with some serious explaining to soap fans, many of whom were making their maiden voyage into digital streaming and were put off from it entirely by the experience.
Hulu’s original obsession with teamwork, communication and “making it as easy as possible for builders to build and innovators to innovate” began crumbling as early as 2011 when the company decided to move its consumer advocate department, the department Kilar himself once declared the most vital, away from the company core.
It was shortly after his departure that Hulu moved headquarters altogether, declining to rejoin with its consumer advocate team. While interdepartmental camaraderie was boasted in the interior design of Hulu’s new space, Hulu’s customer-facing staff remained in a non-descript building with little to no face-to-face communication with departments able to actually enact change.
Within less than one year, Hulu’s “open, casual, interactive work environment” descended into loyalties among cable providers, networks and ad strategies designed clearly for network and advertiser’s benefit, often leaving customers with no more than a mumbled ‘sorry’ for failed promises and nonsensical content availability.
Hulu’s purchase of ad-space on non-participating networks is no accident. That understanding Hulu’s relatively new cable authentication plan requires doing basic algebra to determine availability dates is no accident. This, one can assume, is not what was meant by “delighting customers.”
It’s certainly possible the sharp, drastic veering from Hulu’s original mission owes much to Providence Media Partners, a private-equity firm generally loyal to Kilar, deciding to sell its 10% stake in Hulu last year, leaving Hulu’s dreamier goals without any of Providence’s muscle to protect them.
Although it was assumed in 2010 and 2011 that Hulu would go public, it never did, leaving it vulnerable to the whims of NewsCorp and Disney joint owners and the dreamers on Hulu’s board more vulnerable to large corporate bullying.
Hopkins was on this very board and was around for what he admits was a tumultuous year for Hulu. No one has yet spoken to what side of the fence Hopkins has been on historically or if FOX content’s shift to the dark side of cable authentication is any indicator of things to come.
Hopefully Hopkins will be able to stand up against the board myopia that has, for a significant time now, hobbled Hulu’s success potential and return Hulu to its old reputation for “relentless pursuit of better ways.”
Image: Imeh Akpanudosen/WireImage
Topics: Business, ceo, hulu, Media, netflix, Television, Video, video streaming
About the author
Admin
Duis sed tellus et tortor vestibulum gravida. Praesent elementum elit at tellus. Curabitur metus ipsum, luctus eu, malesuada ut, tincidunt sed, diam. Donec quis mi sed magna hendrerit accumsan.
0 comments: