Hulu and Building a Brand on the Web
It’s funny, about 20 minutes ago I was watching Jon Stewart on Boxee and thinking how amazing it was. (I was also thinking about how annoying it was that advertising hadn’t caught up with online video yet and I had to sit through the same annoying trailer six times while watching the show.) Then I read that Hulu is forcing Boxee to stop including it. Hulu CEO Jason Kilar wrote an apologetic post about it, blaming their content providers (to which Boxee responded).
In addition to Boxee, Hulu also pulled all its content from CBS’s TV.com. AdAge has another side of the story, suggesting that the reason Hulu is actually protecting it’s own turf, because “the exclusive part of that NBC-News Corp. deal lasts only two years, and Hulu knows all too well that the scarcity that helped it establish an audience (and brand) is going away soon.” While this all seems like bad news at the moment, I have to think that the competition is a good thing. As Learmonth closes the article, “It didn’t take long for Hulu to build an audience, and a brand, but going forward, the question is whether it can defend what it has built.” (It’s always good to be reminded of how fast one site can rise and another can fall on the web.)