The first positive points we’ve awarded to Hulu come for pure honesty with George Kliavkoff, NBC Universal’s chief digital officer telling a crowd at OMMA New York Monday that they should expect failure from Hulu.
To be fair, as much as the headline quote alone is worthy of at least a couple of links demonstrating how the bridesmaid service has failed already, in context Kliavkoff’s quote is good advice for any startup: you have to fail sometimes to succeed:
” you have to fail fast in order to quickly identify your errors and cut your losses. Success involves setting up “processes to fail fast.”
According to Kliavkoff, Hulu will launch in October and NBC will be providing incentives for viewers to spend time at Hulu. What those incentives are were not disclosed, nor was it explained why users would visit Hulu for NBC content when NBC itself is now offering its shows as free ad-supported downloads on NBC Direct.
Kliavkoff also told the audience that he does not believe that viewers will ever prefer consumer-generated content over premium fare, saying that “at the end of the day, premium, produced content wins,” an interesting take given the phenomenal success of services including YouTube and others.
(via Mediapost)
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let’s c if they can survive the failure.
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
Maybe the “incentives” will be part of a “rewards program” where “participating stores” will offer “tie-ins” like 40% off on a popcorn upgrade from medium to large at certain FOX movies… Or maybe they’ll offer some kind of “hulu bucks” that you can redeem for… a 40% discount on a popcorn upgrade at a FOX movie… or something cool and imaginative like that.
Just got back from OMMA -
NBC was also at MIXX a few blocks away.
Very frustrating having both expos on the same days. Hope they don’t make the mistake next year
Talk about competition
And what exactly does “premium content” mean? Have we all succumbed to marketing-ese here? Can’t we just call it what it is? “Corporately-produced programming”. That’s not a value judgment, I like lots of network TV shows. That’s just using an accurate and honest term, something “chief digital officers” don’t seem to understand these days…
Hmmm…. the site cost $100 million dollars to make.
No body is going to download rerun shows… Trust people on this… They are not going to waste their time download videos and buy more HD space. Remember the old VCR. There’s no place to put tapes on shelf. They threw junks away. People perfer to watch TV. Because FPS is much better and easy to change channels after commercial break.
I remember NBC launch NBCi commercial. That product was commercial failure. No one go there. you scaring people every time you launch newly beta or product. How many people go NBC.com?
people like NBC world news than websites.
I am keen to seen what those incentives will be. They have to choose the right incentives to actually make people stay on the site.
“an interesting take given the phenomenal success of services including YouTube and others.”
what does it really mean?(i’m not a english-speaking man,i want to know what he wanted to express)
At least HULU caused NBC to come to their senses and dump that facist iTombs crap! Well it was a HULU-va-time!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
““an interesting take given the phenomenal success of services including YouTube and others.”
what does it really mean?(i’m not a english-speaking man,i want to know what he wanted to express)”
He means that youtube and others are successful, at least in part, due to their user generated content. In other words, he is implying the executive has empirically been proven wrong as many user generated video sites have been successful.
Mr. Kliavkoff was hired to trumpet the so-called “professionally produced contents”, so I won’t fault him for making statements like the pro stuff will “win” in the end. His candidness regarding Hulu notwithstanding, nobody expects him to capitulate even before Hulu goes live. He’s got a job to do, and we’re talking fairly substantial paychecks here, so I understand.
But what the gentleman said reveals the ignorance of the leadership of NBC (and old media in general) in that they still think this is a “professionally produced glitzy shows versus amateurish user-generated videos” situation. Sad that they still have this attitude as the broadband culture explodes, and people find out they don’t have to reach for their TV remotes to get entertainment any more.
I used to work with these TV/Movie studio heads, and let me be the first one to say these guys do work hard to do what they are hired to do — to sign up Hollywood’s hottest talents. Prior to 2005, there was no such thing as YouTube, and these guys could go home happy every night thinking they had just gotten Tom Cruise to inch closer to signing on the bottom line for their latest blockbuster franchise. Flash forward to 2007, they go home, and their children and grandmas are telling them that they are spending hours on YouTube, instead of watching TVs or going out to the movies. Some of these smart MBAs or law school graduates might even sign on to YouTube to find out what all the fuss is about. I bet most of them got frustrated real quick, and decided that the solution to this problem is to hire some “talents”.
Thus, “Hulu’ was born. And we thank them for providing comedic materials in blogosphere.
Mister Riley, I think you are mistaken. “Failure” is nowhere to be found in the fall NBC line-up!
thank you alexanderpink,i know what that mean now.
“and their children and grandmas are telling them that they are spending hours on YouTube, instead of watching TVs or going out to the movies”
And what are they watching on YouTube? Southpark snippets? Simpson’s snippets? The Daily show? Movie trailers?
Saying that YouTube and other sights are so large because of user generated content just doesn’t make sense as most people I know watch professionally produced content on Youtube — from the good parts of Saturday Night Live to the bad parts of Britney Spears’ recent VMA performance. Just sayin.
I think the guy has a point saying that people prefer professionally produced content in the end, they just don’t prefer it in front of the TV served with a side order of ads as much as they used to…
Your title is backwards.
NBCU Chief: Expect Failure From Hulu
Big names, big ambitions, and precious little in the way of original thinking. This has all the promise of the ill-fated Pop.com, which flamed out sometime around ‘99. The following is from a stray archive on the web:
“Film directors Steve Spielberg and Ron Howard are joining forces to create entertainment exclusively for the Web. The new company, POP.com, has $50 million seed money from high-tech entrepreneur Paul Allen, who will own 50% of the company.
“POP.com plans to trade with various movie stars, exchanging an ownership stake for their participation. Which could be very valuable down the road, as POP.com proceeds toward an initial public offering.”
I think that Sawyer Joe might have a point, perhaps inadvertently, in asking what exactly the “phenomenal success” of YouTube means. What constitutes a “phenomenal success”? Certainly, the company was a phenomenal success for investors and corporate employees. It has been a phenomenal success in generating tremendous web traffic. But has it truly been proven a phenomenal success as an operating business?
I think that the larger, long-term issue at play is the type of content that advertisers will be willing to stand behind and advertise before, after, and in. There is already good evidence that advertisers will flock toward professionally-produced content over UG (see Crackle’s recent upswing after abandonging UG content). The definition of professionally-produced is certain to change with declining costs of producing video, but there will still be a wide chasm between someone with a high quality HD camera and editing software and UG-pet-trick-home-videos tossed up on YouTube.
This is not a religious debate about UG content vs. studio produced content. I think that those who drive the argument to that level are missing the nuances of how quality entertainment will be developed in the future. There is democratization happening in content production, but it must happen in a manner that is rational, reasonable, and ultimately attractive to advertisers.
I can only speak from personal experience. Most of my friends are more than happy to pay $0.99-$1.99 to download “premium” ad-free content from iTunes…no other service since they all have iPods. Otherwise they’re going to go to Bittorrent. Until companies like NBC understand that, any other endeavour they attempt is going to fail.
He means that youtube and others are successful, at least in part, due to their user generated content. In other words, he is implying the executive has empirically been proven wrong as many user generated video sites have been successful.
Yeah, but put them all together and they still don’t add up to a fraction of the traffic of the pirated stuff on YouTube: the Daily Show, Colbert Report, music videos, movie outtakes. Not to mention mashups of copyrighted content.
that sucks…but demonoid will be back up for sure? and indeffinetly?
I am leaving a comment here because i think the comments section has been disabled in the 29 august post.
Reading the comments that followed that article, I find it ridiculous when most comments made are uneducated. I think most Americans and Europeans have never even heard of the race ‘Malay’. If they have, they think Malays are Malaysians. They also think Singapore is a part of China. Yea I’ve met many of those.
I am Singaporean Malay.
Although I am of mix heritage, I was brought up with Malay as my mother tongue and as my culture. And because I am Singaporean, whose culture is very inter racial, I also speak quite a bit of Mandarin. I am fluent in English, Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia. I’ve lived in Indonesia for 2 years and I trained Indonesians in strictly Bahasa Indonesia.
So this is my 2 cents worth to all the comments and also the hoo haa about the meaning of HULU.
Bahasa Indonesia is not a dialect of Bahasa Melayu. Both languages have words that are similar but they are not the same. The Malays and Indonesians might not necessarily understand one another unless otherwise been exposed to the other language quite frequently.
And there is no such thing as the Chinese language. There is Mandarin, there is Teochew or Hokkien or Cantonese etc… those are languages of the Chinese (all these languages spoken in Singapore btw). When people say ‘hulu means snoring in chinese’… it is utterly ridiculous because there is no such thing as Chinese language.
HULU does mean BUTT in either Bahasa Melayu or Bahasa Indonesia. However, there are lots of dialects in Indonesia. I don’t know if it could mean ‘butt’ in any Indonesian dialect (there are tons: Javanese, Sundanese, Minang, Boyanese, Batak etc etc) but to reiterate…. it certainly does not mean ‘butt’ in Bahasa Melayu or Bahasa Indonesia.
‘ke hulu’ means to go upstream. just that.
‘butt’ in malay: bontot, punggong, pantat.
However ‘pantat’ to the Malays in Malaysia means ‘vagina’.
So yea go figure.
We have an expression in Malay: “ada apa pada sebuah nama”. It means “what is there to a name”.
So yea.