Kara Visits Hulu (With Louie)!
by Kara Swisher
Posted on April 7, 2008 at 12:43 AM PT
While in Los Angeles, BoomTown visited the offices of Hulu, the online video service that has been an unexpected bright spot for two Hollywood behemoths–NBC Universal (GE) and News Corp. (NWS) (owner of this site)–who launched the premium online video service as a joint venture last year.
Helmed by former Amazon exec Jason Kilar, not much was expected of Hulu, given that traditional entertainment companies have been slower than slow in embracing the digitization of their businesses.
But, armed with the clout of its partners, along with $100 million in private equity from Providence Equity Partners, as I wrote back in late October, Hulu has been a pretty decent effort and has gained surprising traction, both in its distributed content and also on its site.
Yet despite its clean look, easy-to-use tools, relative openness and also addition of more and more premium content, it will still be a long slog for Hulu, as it tries to make a big business out of all of it and battle the increasing power of bigger sites like Google’s YouTube.
Nonetheless, so far, so good. And, so we visited its HQ in Santa Monica, Calif., with our No. 1 son, Louie Swisher (Hulu’s true audience) in tow to see how the service is put together and meet some of its employees.
Thus, this fine video, in which Louie does a very good dance interpretation of the service at the start–although what else would a mother say?
(Also, here is a longer interview with Kilar about Hulu and its future.)
