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Hulu CEO: "We screwed up royally"
- tptacek 18y agoNote 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.
- fallentimes 18y agoAnd took full responsibility instead of shedding the blame on others. Talk about defying expectations, Hulu is incredible.
- staunch 18y agoFrom what I've seen of Jason Kilar he seems like a damn good CEO. Totally excellent candidate for a Founders at Work II interview.
- ALee 18y agoAgreed. 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.
- tdavis 18y agoZuckerberg winning that award was a partial contribution to the incredibly laughable nature of that entire production.
- pg 18y agoCan you point to any mistakes he's made? He seems to me to have done a remarkably good job.
- inglorian 18y agoThe Beacon advertising fiasco comes to mind...
- pg 18y agoReleasing features users don't like is not necessarily a mistake. You can never tell for sure whether users will like something till you release it. So the optimal plan for a startup is to keep releasing new stuff, and when something sucks, admit it fairly quickly. Which I believe is what they did.
- tdavis 18y agoBesides 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.)
- pg 18y agoIt'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?
- iamdave 18y agoMistakes 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.
- unalone 18y agoI'm a bit confused. Who's lacking clothes in your analogy?
- geuis 18y agoI'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.
- unalone 18y agoThey'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.
- wmf 18y agoThe real problem is that the whole concept of "release windows" is confusing and frustrating. Better explanations won't fix it.
- unalone 18y agoYeah. I don't think Hulu is the end-all be-all of online TV. It's just the best we've seen to date. Them giving dates (on The Daily Show it says "This will only be here for 5 more days") seems to work pretty well, though.
- anewaccountname 18y ago
- aston 18y agoThey even got two episodes added back that weren't there before (The Gang Gets Whacked, pts. 1 & 2). Sweet.
- dfranke 18y agoIt seems "ClownCo" isn't quite turning out like we expected. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5972 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5972
- Xichekolas 18y agoNo 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.
- dabeeeenster 18y agoWhy 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...
- noor420 18y agois it just me getting this feeling lately or 37 signals is trying to spam HN
- jonursenbach 18y agoIs it 37 who's spamming HN, or is it their fanbois?
- axod 18y agoThe other day there were 4 37signals posts on the top page here. I think one is more than enough usually...
- quellhorst 18y agoThis seems to go in phases... First TechCrunch spam, then anything Zed Posts, now anything 37s posts.
- dabeeeenster 18y agoIt's been anything 37s posts for months and months. HN is practically an RSS feed for the 37s blog...
- unalone 18y agoBecause more people read 37signals than read the Hulu blog. This is how I came across the message, too. And some people use the HN autosubmit bookmarklet for fast posting.
- mhartl 18y agoIt's a follow-up to their recent post on this subject: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1528-the-bullshit-of-outage-language http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1528-the-bullshit-of-outage-l... (posted here as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432737 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432737).
- chris11 18y agoI 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.
- kwamenum86 18y agoIt's funny that 37s thought the apology letter was great because it violated some of the principles they laid out for good apologies.
- charlesju 18y agoHow hard is it to create a startup when you have all the premium content on TV at your disposal?
- jadence 18y agoExcellent 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.