Rich Fiscus
21 May 2008 10:25
When Hulu, the online video service jointly owned by NBC Universal and News Corp, opened to the public earlier this year many people were pleasantly surprised to find that they actually liked it quite a bit. In addition to providing TV shows and movies from their own portal they also have a number of partners offering the content to their own visitors. On Tuesday Hulu announced deals to add content to another 7 websites, including TV.com (formerly TVTome), TVGuide.com, and Zap2it.com.
According to figures from Nielsen's VideoCensus Hulu streamed more video in April (its first full month of operation) than any US television network website. Hulu viewers reportedly streamed 63.2 million videos compared to 60.8 million from former the former frontrunner, Disney's ABC.com.
But as successful as they've been, not everything appears to be going as well as some analysts expected. James McQuivey, Vice President and Principal Analyst with Forrester Research, feels websites like AOL, MySpace, and Yahoo could do a better job of promoting Hulu videos. At the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit he said "the partners have a little more work to do to capture their fair share of the audience."
Hulu CEO Jason Kilar seems to agree. He indicated that aside from the Hulu site itself, most viewers of their content have to rely on some type of search to find what they're looking for. He also said they'll be working with their partners to address the issue.
"Our mission is to help people find and enjoy the world's premium content when, where and how they want it," he said. "It can go a lot of different places."