Hulu Discusses Private Beta, Suggests Public Launch Time Frame
Mark Hendrickson
38 comments »
Update: Hulu has provided 2,000 more invites for our readers. Get yours here.
I had the chance yesterday to sit down with Eric Feng, the CTO of Hulu, to discuss how things have gone during its private beta and where the service is heading in 2008. Here are some of the things I learned:
- The first line of code was written on August 6th, less than 3 months before Hulu debuted in private beta, and almost five months after the joint venture was first announced.
- Eric joined Hulu on July 15th, only a few weeks before development began, bringing with him the entire engineering team from Chinese video startup Mojiti (turns out the rumor we reported was correct).
- Hulu has about 30 developers, half of which are based in Beijing and focused on the site’s design and functionality, the other half of which are based in Southern California and deal with operations, advertising, etc.
- Hulu currently has “several hundred thousand users” who have submitted “tens of thousands” of feedback messages.
- The public launch should come in the next couple of months, probably around the end of March.
- Hulu’s private beta has been a technical one, as the developer team has had to work on stabilizing the service while sorting through feedback from testers and improving the user interface (search has been enhanced in particular).
- Hulu is built on Ruby on Rails.
- High definition video will be rolled out gradually over the coming year with more and more content; the company believes that 2008 will be a year when online video companies start focusing less on convenience and more on quality.
- Hulu has tripled its amount of content since private beta launch, with many episodes of shows going back to the first seasons, not just the last five that have aired on TV.
- Hulu is not only a place to view Hulu-hosted video but one to find video hosted elsewhere on the net; the service actually scrapes ABC’s websites so that it can provide deep links to that network’s content.
- RSS feeds have been added so users can keep track of new content added to the site.
- The company is experimenting with different forms of advertising, including overlay ads and trailers for movies.
- As far as sites like OPENhulu go, Hulu will address them on a case-by-case basis. The company seems most concerned about protecting its brand (the use of the name “hulu” in “OPENhulu” is problematic) and protecting the brands of its content providers. In regards to the latter point, Hulu actually has a blacklist of sites where people can’t embed videos. These are mainly sites that host content, such as pornography, that content providers don’t want their content displayed alongside. In general, Hulu can monitor where people embed its videos, and it withholds the right to deactivate any embeds. That said, it strongly supports the syndication of its content across the web.
- Nearly 85% of Hulu’s library is viewed everyday at least once.
- Hulu is working on providing its videos internationally but content rights issues will take time to work through. Eric couldn’t provide any time table for when we might see Hulu available internationally (if you don’t want to wait, see Duncan’s post).
- Downloads might come in the long term, but they are not something that Hulu is focusing on currently.
- And finally, “Hulu” actually comes from either of two Chinese interpretations. It could mean “interactive recording” (Hu + Lu), or it could mean a Chinese gourd that holds precious things. That company prefers the latter (they certainly don’t prefer our Swahili interpretation).
Our initial review of Hulu can be found here.
I need access to this!
“Hulu is built on Ruby on Rails”
If it was built on RoR, does anyone know why they’re looking for C# .Net developers?
http://www.hulu.com/jobs/dev_o....._developer
Have you guys forgotten view of how narrow Hulu really is? Not to mention how “sweet” that US-only approach really is.
How many posts about Hulu will we have to digest, while in the meantime, not even one shameful review of open, community-driven sites like catodicos.com
And I though TC was more about startups than bigco’s enterprises… :-/
@3
Catodicos is such a crappy site filled with chinese pirated tv shows. Thanks for the laugh.
@3
Because its crap and Hulu is 1000x better.
Well written post!
Great post! I is interesting that they are indexing ABC and CBS.
Thank you Hulu and others sites like it! My cable bill is now zero!
Hook your PC up to an LCD TV and enjoy (my setup http://techavid.com - not spam just sharing )
Unfortunately I can not try, since I am not in the USA
Sure you can try outside the US, I’ve been doing it for months. (there was a post about using hotspotShield in here?)
Hulu is great. I wish Lost and some shows from other networks were in it though. Getting ABC’s HD streaming to work with HotspotShield seems to be hit or miss.
Hulu is pretty awesome. For major media companies to actually get something of this size right is amazing.
Can’t wait to see what’s in store for the future.
Hulu is actually part of my cable/satellite free entertainment setup. And with HD coming there is almost no reason to get cable anymore if you’re smart about things.
I like the outline format of this story - it’s how I would write most of my college papers and I rarely got complaints from professors.
Thanks!
Lets just hope the billion-dollar baby is(n’t still)born finally.
In a year’s time, no one will remember if it was Hulu, Lulu or Pulu — you seen one, you seen ‘em all.
Old media died a long time ago. But the lemmings keep on limpin’ to the latest fad hittin’ their laptops. Look ma, I got TV!!!
hulu, schmulu. Only if they put everything that is on tv to online will it take off.
I am fortunate enough to have access to Hulu. Its amazing. Crappy UG content owned by a Valley distribution company doesn’t compete with high quality produced content.
Valley aint going to win the Video market.
a great alternative with big media backing
yupnup.com
Thanks to TechCrunch, I have access to Hulu. When I first heard about it I was not expecting much, but it’s fantastic. It’s the way all networks should handle their online content.
I do most of my watching online, so taking the video with me isn’t a big deal.
What I like best is the one day delay in the shows that appeared the previous night. I used to download them through Bittorrent, but now I just jump on Hulu.
I also like the little touches like the option to turn down the lights and how it remembers where I was in an episode when I come back.
I don’t like the limited content and I really don’t like the edited versions of movies.
The ads aren’t so bad. I actually pay attention if they are different between the breaks. Cisco runs the same damn commercial over and over again. The cruise line has the best commercials.
Between Hulu and Netflix streaming I don’t watch much TV anymore.
Geof and Alaska - you’re welcome.
My point however was missed in the mud for the sake of a comeback that even my 5 years old nephew could improve. Try focusing on the last line of my comment. Just remember Hulu is what MA used to call Clown Company if I remember correctly.
Anyway, say what you wish. I take bitTorrent any day over NBC and friends.
I hated on Hulu, but I have to admit I want in now.
re: RoR and C#, Ruby is OOP so it’s good to be able to rock real live codez when you gotta dig in the guts. Also there’s a glut of people who went straight from .net to RoR so maybe Hulu just wants to make sure the kids gots chops…? Just my .02.
@2 and @19
I’m a software engineer working at Hulu. While our site is built using Ruby on Rails, parts of our back-end are built on other platforms. Naturally our player is in Flash, and we have a code base built on top of .NET as well. We’re looking for really talented engineers for each of the tech stacks that we’re using, and no matter the technology we’re always looking for people who’re great at CS fundamentals. Hope this helps!
So how come the Techcrunch Beta invites don’t decrement? It was showing 1801 invites remaining every time I clicked on the link above - even after registering myself…. Odd…
hey Ilya - there’s that thing called Crunchboard jobs, you know?
I love the “we’re looking for really talented engineers” line. has anyone actually ever read somewhere “we’re looking for dumb engineers”?
Ilya, you should advertise in Finland with the slogan:
“hullu insinoori haussa” which means “crazy engineer wanted”
just a thought.
You gotta love the limited commercial interruptions brought to you by company X. And freaking corporate bug in the corner. If this is the wave of the future, I’m quite happy to stick to eztv.
I’ve been enjoying Hulu. It’s pretty cool. I wish it had more content and didn’t restrict seasons to only a few shows.
Thanks for the plug Mark, thank god OpenHulu’s not on the banned list yet.
Thanks for the additional invites!
Still 800+ left!
Ive been using OpenHulu, but I feel more special having an invite to the real thing.
Hulu is pretty nice. I hate when they skip episodes in a show though. Extremely frustrating.