Hulu Makes First Acquisition; Chinese Video Startup To Form Backbone Of New Service
Michael Arrington
37 comments »
We haven’t heard much about Bejing-based startup Mojiti before this week. They popped up in the TechCrunch Forums in January and are notable because the founder, Eric Feng, was previously at Microsoft Research Asia. Nothing other than that, and they do not appear to have many users.
But they sure are in the spotlight now: a source with knowledge of the deal indicates that the $1 billion News Corp./NBC online video joint venture Hulu has acquired the company and is using its platform for the basis of the upcoming Hulu service.
Mojiti is a basic online video platform that also allows users to annotate videos at specific time points. The annotation feature is somewhat similar to another startup, click.tv, which is rumored to have been acquired by Cisco.
The deal may have originally leaked via an overheard airport conversation as the Mojiti execs flew back to Asia after meetings with Hulu in the U.S. Neither company has officially confirmed the deal. Rumored price is in the $10 million range.
It is surprising that Hulu would use a third party platform for their service rather than build it themselves from the ground up. They’ve already missed their promised Summer 2007 launch date, however, and probably think the acquisition will get them to market faster.
They should’ve named it HUMBUG rather than HULU!!!
Nonsense!
Hope Hulu is not rushing into this just because they missed the summer 2007 launch date. Especially when Mojiti don’t seem to be having too many users.
Could have been Vidler
Interesting, but I still don’t like the name!
Rex
Video chinese !! but not…..
@Marshall Kirkpatrick, it certainly could have…life is all about timing and opportunities.
It is not a surprise. We are so caught up with what we are familiar with that we sometimes we don’t look outside out bubble.
Cisco is positioning them self to become the the backbone of the online Video.
Companies like Cisco make IT seem cool. They have done a impressive jobs of honing their video conferencing skills.
Yeah, sounds to me like they took themselves an idea from Viddler…, my current favorite video site.
Why not just buy a US firm that does this? Why complicate it with going to Asia?
I hope hulu is as awesome as mojiti!
I tried Mojiti ( pronounced “Mo hitty” further fuel for the Clown Co, naming silliness ) out a while back and it sucked. It was FireFox hostile and put a huge temp file in IE.
It seems to me video sharing is getting so competitive nowadays and who knows one day one may watch one full movie straight online instead of downloading them as what we are doing now
@James Thomas - Viddler was my exclusive video player for some time and I like their in-video metacontent, but have started using Facebook because of the userbase.
@Rob Walters - My best guess is content distribution in China
I guess, it just seems odd.
Thanks……..Rob
BunkerShot DOT com Golf Online
Editor
“leaked via an overheard airport conversation”.
interesting. How about this business idea? keeping a spy in all key airports and pick stocks based on the clues. Even one clue is good enough to make it big.
@Michael:
Why do you say “It is surprising that Hulu would use a third party platform for their service rather than build it themselves from the ground up.”?
Couldn’t the same be said for any acquisition? Presumably they are buying the technology, the know-how, the experience, and other valuable pieces. This gets them to their goal faster without rediscovering situations and problems that others have already faces and solved. No?
@Otis - agreed, typical balance between organic and acquisitional growth.
Wow - a nearly unbiased report on Hulu.
Otis - sure. maybe. but remember when they promised a mostly decentralized platform? no mention of that recently, and mojiti isn’t the right tech for that. I sense chaos and disorganization, not a smart strategic decision to buy v. build. And a new strategy to focus on a centralized, youtube-like site. And remember that Adobe already built all the hard parts of this and put it in the Flex platform. For some reason people are giving Hulu a lot of room before judging them. I prefer to judge them now.
@Michael - I haven’t followed Hulu-lulu closely enough to notice and remember claims about decentralization (though I can’t think of a reason why they would push that type of a differentiator…?), but who knows, maybe this Mohito technology can do that, too, or is at least good enough starting point.
@michael - agreed with your comment. This seems like a knee jerk purchase to meet a management-imposed goal. Does not bode well for Hulu’s future.
I tried Mojiti a while ago — good stuff, mostly for video remixing and annotation. The acquisition makes sense if they want to allow for user generated content mixed up with studio content, which would be an interesting approach to take to market.
Joost are smart and released their the API recently so 3rd party developers could create widgets that do similar things to what Mojiti is reportedly doing for Hulu.
Who cares? TV programs in general suck. I don’t care to view it now over the web. I saw some Joost when it came out, there wasn’t much there other than watching some crappy MTV show. I thought I’d watch now that more stuff is on, but who has time to sit down and watch a show on their computer.
mojiti is old hat. check out the new hypervideo sites such as asterpix.
Michael - agree with your assesment - this technology does nothing for the fantasy Hulu can been promoting. This experiment is going to be worse than NBBC (or whatever NBC called their now defunct) platform. Expected better from Jason Kilar.
Wonder what those boys at Providence Equity have to say about their $100 million investment. Mo Money = Mo Jiti
The funniest part is the YouTube Videos all over the Mojiti home page - Classic!
It doesn’t look like you can even upload video to Mojiti itself. As far as I can tell the only way to “add” video is to upload it to someone else’s site (YouTube, mostly) and then point Mojiti to that URL. Has anyone seen something different?
If that’s true, this has to be just one small part of the Lulu, err, Hulu puzzle. Or maybe they just really liked the name. Either way, I hope they got it cheap.
I’m fed-up with the chinese!
A few months ago the Olympics IT Committee announced that the systems running critical applications for the games will not be running Vista but XP:
“Yang Yuanqing, chairman of Lenovo, miffed the Vole during a briefing in Beijing earlier this month, when he said that the Olympic Games require mature, stable technologies and were not the place to try out something new.
As a result, all the Olympic Games’ vital PC-related tasks, including games management systems, the results systems, commentator information systems, and the staff and scheduling systems, will run on XP.”
Seeing the terrible mistake these people were making and being very concerned about the image of the Olympic games I made a few phone calls to certain key people:
1. Darnd Dangkut’r (Chinese Olympics liason)
This guy was no help at all, he kept pretending that he didn’t speak english, “No speeky-dee anglash, No speeky-dee anglash,”. I let him know that I knew this old trick and knew that he could understand every word I was saying. Dispite my protestations, he kept the act up. But I know I straightened him out!
2. The Levnovonovo Guy Yang;
He didn’t dare try the “no speeky-dee” trick on me. I just kinda’ nicely reminded him how MS was a “strategic partner” and how it would be in both parties best interest to “accentuate critical deployment structures relevant to business operabilities in mission subjectively critical outgoing peramiters within heterogenius chinese lateral markets!” He got the message! I know because he just kept saying, “yes missa Ballme, yes missa Ballme, yes missa Ballme, …”
I ended the conversation with a little chinese of my own, “shiut shiut”, he replied, “yes missa Ballme,”. Good call.
3. Wen Jiabao 温家宝; Premier PRC;
He started out, “no speeky-dee”, I cut him off! “I’m not falling for that Wen!” Then suddenly some woman’s voice came over the line, she claimed to be a “transistor”. I told her that I knew what a transistor was and she wasn’t one! I just slammed the phone down on them! Boy, I bet they were upset, but they got the message.
You just gotta know how to handle people from different cultures, that’s why I’m CEO!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Frame based video annotation is old now. Hypervideo or object based annotation is the new trend and provides a good video monetization model. Check out asterpix.com.