
Hulu CEO: "We screwed up royally" - peter123
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1534-hulu-ceo-we-screwed-up-royally
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dabeeeenster
Why is this linked through 37signals? Why not just link through to the
original message?

I understand people respect 37s here for whatever reason, but sometimes the
linking is just ridiculous. This has nothing to do with 37s...

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noor420
is it just me getting this feeling lately or 37 signals is trying to spam HN

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quellhorst
This seems to go in phases... First TechCrunch spam, then anything Zed Posts,
now anything 37s posts.

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dabeeeenster
It's been anything 37s posts for months and months. HN is practically an RSS
feed for the 37s blog...

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dfranke
It seems "ClownCo" isn't quite turning out like we expected.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5972>

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Xichekolas
No joke. I _love_ Hulu, and when I found out it was just a joint venture I was
kind of surprised. It really is a great substitute for traditional TV.

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tptacek
Note that he didn't just say the right things; they backed it up with actions.
They got the eps re-added for two weeks to provide notice.

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fallentimes
And took full responsibility instead of shedding the blame on others. Talk
about defying expectations, Hulu is incredible.

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staunch
From what I've seen of Jason Kilar he seems like a damn good CEO. Totally
excellent candidate for a Founders at Work II interview.

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ALee
Agreed. He was my vote for the CEO Crunchies Award. Just because someone has a
good product is one factor, but I think this guy handles himself like CEOs
should.

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tdavis
Zuckerberg winning that award was a partial contribution to the incredibly
laughable nature of that entire production.

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pg
Can you point to any mistakes he's made? He seems to me to have done a
remarkably good job.

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tdavis
Besides Beacon, he seems to interview pretty poorly, Facebook is still
hemorrhaging money so he hasn't managed the whole "profitability" thing, and
there's the whole ConnectU fiasco to name a few. Considering the fact that
he's 24 and running a place like FB, I think he's done a good job _all things
considered_ , but the award was for "Best Startup CEO" not "Best Startup CEO
who is still young so doesn't really know he is doing, but is doing pretty
well in spite of his lack of experience."

Because that would be way too long for Om Malik to say remotely coherently.

(P.S. I think I would make an _awful_ CEO of FB, but I also think there are
far more competent Startup CEOs out there than Zuckerberg, it just so happens
he gets a ton of press, which means it makes sense that he would win an award
that is determined by a mass of mouth-breathing, TC-reading publics. Sort of
like how it makes sense the Twitter founders won "Best Founders" since,
apparently, any press is good press, even press that constantly points out how
incompetent you are.)

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pg
It's not necessarily a mistake to focus on growth instead of revenue,
especially in the business they're in. It was certainly right to focus on
growth initially. At some point there is presumably a threshold where revenue
becomes more important. Are you sure you know better than Zuckerberg where
that threshold is?

I'm not. I wouldn't want to bet their strategy has been optimal, but I
wouldn't want to bet against it either. At the (very coarse) precision at
which I can judge, their strategy seems optimal. Can you judge with finer
precision?

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tdavis
If I had a 150MM users, I'd start worrying more about how to monetize them
than I would about getting more. Facebook has been around 5 years, has taken
over 500MM in funding and still requires a yearly influx of investor capital
to keep running. To me, that signifies a problem (or, if not a problem, at
least an early warning bell). I cannot judge with any finer precision, but
from my perspective the strategy is no longer optimal.

I suppose sometime within the next decade we'll find out who was right.
Although, given the choice, I will pretty much always bet against a bread-and-
butter social network like FB. Statistically it's a really safe bet.

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pg
In a market where there's a tendency toward centralization, what matters is
the percentage of users you have, not the absolute number. Facebook only
passed Myspace in traffic last month. Surely it's at least reasonable to
believe the threshold for when to put revenue first might be in the future.

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axod
Do you have to be _the_ #1 in a sector to make a lot of money though?

Plentyoffish has just overtaken match as top dating site in the US - some
parallels with facebook. Difference is, plentyoffish has been massively
profitable for years... Why hasn't facebook? Do they need 10,000+ servers and
all those staff? The big fancy expensive offices?

Facebook seems like a tech bubble in itself to me.

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staunch
Zuckerberg is taking the road less traveled. Most sane people would have
cashed out $100MM and walked away as soon as they could have. I would have.

He's trying to turn Facebook into a billion+/year revenue company by utilizing
an as of yet proven (or identified?) business model.

Worst case scenario is that he could do what MySpace did. Put horrible ads all
over the site and milk it for everything it's worth. Should turn profit if
they then cut back on spending (and fire 80% of their staff).

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tdavis
"Everything it's worth" being the sum total of office supply costs for Fox
last fiscal year.

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charlesju
How hard is it to create a startup when you have all the premium content on TV
at your disposal?

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jadence
Excellent point. In many ways I think the networks get a bit too much credit
for Hulu.

I thought a bit about it think and I think the accolades are largely because
people didn't expect much after the fiascos of the RIAA and the MPAA. How many
of us here expected the networks to be able to embrace, adapt, and deliver
like they did with Hulu? I know I sure didn't.

Sure many readers here could've built something equivalent or better given
rights to the content and half the capital injection but IMO the networks
still deserve recognition for Hulu.

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chris11
I think Hulu did great in this situation. It's not like they have said they
would keep episodes of shows up forever, shows get removed a lot. FX wanted
the show off, so they basically had to take the show off.The only bad point
was originally they would have lost credibilty as a reliable place to watch
shows, but the notice and addition of the show for another two weeks show they
are taking this seriously. Hulu has earned some of my respect, I'm impressed.

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kwamenum86
It's funny that 37s thought the apology letter was great because it violated
some of the principles they laid out for good apologies.

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aston
They even got two episodes added back that weren't there before (The Gang Gets
Whacked, pts. 1 & 2). Sweet.

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geuis
I'm sorry, but I think everyone is missing the point. Why is Hulu removing
content from their site at all? We live in the age of practical infinite
storage and effectual infinite bandwidth. I wonder if any of these people have
read about the long tail. Even though the economics of the LT are still being
debated, there is absolutely no valid argument to be made about removing
content from your service that has already been made available. For instance,
I have been listening to tech podcasts at ITconversations for years and have
even been an occasional editor. They have a system that rebuilds their entire
collection of shows multiple times per month with new audio ads/sponsors. They
are a much smaller business than something like Hulu and have built a dynamic
infrastructure that works very well. Hulu can slap updated ads onto their
shows much easier than that because it's all flash based. So why are they
removing content at all? That is the question AND the point, not whether or
not they have a proactive and apologetic CEO.

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unalone
They're removing it because the people that created the TV show want it
removed. Those people are the ones with rights to the content.

They also remove The Daily Show after two weeks, because Comedy Central wants
to archive it on their own show. They have that right as content owners.

So I get that you don't like that, but it's their right, and the fact is that
Hulu's so good _because_ they work well with others.

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geuis
That doesn't negate my argument though. Hulu is a creation of major content
owners getting together and agreeing to put their content in one place and to
run advertisements against it. The problem is that the same content owners who
agree to put their content up for a limited time are also not getting the full
picture of how things have changed in the last few years. The methods for
distribution have changed. The content creators no longer have sole control
over the distribution medium, like original tv and radio broadcasting
stations.

The first major break in that decades old paradigm was the wide-spread growth
of cable networks. This opened up more viewing opportunities and made room for
new networks. Comedy Central itself is an example of this. The major networks,
ABC, NBC, and CBS fought against cable pretty heavily in the beginning. Then
they finally caught on and that has been their primary broadcast medium for
the last 20-30 years. Now its happened again, and this time not only are the
old networks being reactionary, so are the same cable networks that sprouted
up as cable tv spread around. This time distribution is online and essentially
worldwide. The content owners are now treating their own websites and services
like channels and tv stations. They want to make the audience come to them in
order to get access to content. They have yet to catch on that this will fail
too.

The audience, us, will get content wherever we want it. A lot of us download
via filesharing and p2p sites. Some of us buy via services like Amazon and
iTunes. Most of us still watch TV, but more and more of us have DVRs and
choose to skip over commercials. We will watch content how and where we want.
The rules of the new paradigm basically mean that content is no longer
packageable. You can't wrap it up in a tape or disk, lock it into a channel,
or lock it down to a website. The audience is no longer vertical, but has
instead gotten much wider and deeper. If you want to make money from the
content you produce, you have to spread it out to every distribution method
where you can get some kind of incremental revenue from it. Instead of having
your content on your one station or website, keep it there and also push it
out to Hulu, TV.com, iTunes, Amazon, Xbox Live, and wherever else you can push
it to. Don't remove your content from certain services as an artificial
mechanism to try to direct where your audience goes to get it. All you end up
doing is alienating your fans and turning them off.

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fizx
You need to hit return twice to start a new paragraph.

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geuis
Fixed. Thanks for the tip.

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gravitycop
More tips here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc>

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iamdave
_Mistakes happen. It’s how you handle them that really matters_

You know that analogy about the king not wearing any clothes, and the little
kid is the only person to notice it?

Yeah.

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unalone
I'm a bit confused. Who's lacking clothes in your analogy?

