The story of the YouTube killer

Wired has a very interesting article about Hulu with an interview with Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu. Jason explains how he came to be involved and how from March 2008 to August they created the 8th largest video site in the US.


There is a great quote in response to the viewing figures the web receives in comparison to TV, from Peter Chernin, president of News Corporation, Fox's corporate parent.

"So what?" Chernin says. "You can't protect old business models artificially." This is a truth the tech community knows well, but it's not what you expect to hear from a media baron like Chernin. What he and Zucker [chief of NBC Universal] have come to understand is that the media companies no longer have a choice: If they don't put their shows online, someone else will. "The best way to combat piracy is to make your content available," Zucker says. "We don't know for sure what the impact is going to be on our established businesses. But we want to make sure consumers know they don't need to steal our content. That's really what Hulu is about."

Read the whole story, it's an interesting read.

Why I trust Hulu (part 2)

In a previous Hulu post I waxed lyrically about the design and general loveliness of using Hulu.

That’s obviously important, but without quality content it’s just html, flash and some quite well done ads. The way Hulu deals with its wide range of content is very impressive and something we can all learn from. Essentially where the content originated from is given little importance. When you view an episode of Heroes there is no mention of which producer, channel or studio owns it. In Hululand it’s the content and the genre of the content which is important, not whether it’s a Fox, Warner Bros or Discovery channel programme.

This is a brave and I believe probably correct approach. The BBC could possibly have launched iPlayer without the channel associations, but they didn't and now it's very difficult to imagine them ever going. If you imagine BBC content on Hulu, there would be no mention of the channels, the stamp of quality would simply be ‘BBC’.


The breadth and amount of quality is impressive (probably greater than that on offer at any given time on the iPlayer). You can watch 37 episodes of Buck Rogers (including the fantastically titled ‘Planet of the Amazon Women’), 57 clips from the Onion News Network, 1152 clips from The Simpsons, 5 episodes and 65 clips of Heroes, and it looks as if all new episodes of The Daily Show will be available.


There are hundreds of full movies, from classics through to more recent releases, and many more movie clips. All for free. Critically, Hulu's content is high quality, profesional content and it's becoming clear this is where the advertisers want to be.

There is a Family channel on Hulu, but the content and the site as a whole are definitely aimed at adults. I imagine at some point this family channel will spin off and a child friendly version of Hulu will launch, possibly to try and compete with the power of Disney.

So what next for Hulu? Well content, advertising and territories are key for future success. Hulu’s in a strong position in terms of content, being backed by NBC and Fox, but there is content from many other providers. The competition is lagging, Joost is going browser based but critically, without the content it won't make the same impact.


YouTube is miles ahead of everyone in terms of video views and audience, but being mainly user generated content, it’s struggling to bring in the advertising bucks that it should be.

Here in the UK we can’t view any Hulu content, and it’s unlikely we’ll ever see hulu.co.uk launching. The main channels in the UK are heavily invested in either the iPlayer, or the future release of Kangaroo (hopefully). It’s unlikely that these channels will hand over content to Hulu, but hopefully project Kangaroo will learn a lot from Hulu and will launch with an impressive, clean, mature and uncluttered product next year. I might register Kangarulu.co.uk just in case.

Note: In the UK you can browse Hulu and get a sense of the breadth of the content, however you can't actually watch the video - unless you are sneaky, or you know someone sneaky.

Why I trust Hulu (part 1)

I’ve been aware of Hulu for sometime, the video joint venture between NBC and Fox, but never really understood the appeal. Hulu now ranks No. 8 among the Top 10 online video sites, which is impressive growth, especially considering that you can only watch the content inside the USA.

Somejiggery-pokery by someone more techie than me has meant that I’ve recently been able to view Hulu as if I was within the United States. What I’ve seen has been very impressive and I’m convinced Hulu is setting the bar by which all video sites should be measured.

Firstly the design of the site is clean, uncluttered and importantly trust-building. By that I mean it’s very professional looking, the images are sharp, high quality and well cropped. There are no banner ads or MPUs. In a world of cluttered crappy video sites, Hulu straight away is different. There are no flash video thumbnails, there are no gimmicks, no content rammed down your throat.


The interactions on the site are simple and logical, and for a site with a lot of content, you never feel overwhelmed. Hulu says ‘you can forget all those crappy video sites which chuck content together and hope it works, THIS is how you do it properly.’ This is an important message in the very cluttered and messy world of online video. Consider the recently relaunched Warner Bros thewb.com and you’ll see what viewers tend to get elsewhere.


The navigation is simple, divided into TV and Movie content, all viewable by popularity, alphabetically and by originator or studio or network. Recently created are channels, where you can view all the content by themes such as ‘Home and Garden'”. All consistent, all trust building.

The site really comes alive once you start watching the content. The video itself is beautiful, clear and of very high production quality - further from YouTube it could not be. The video has all been produced consistently, cuts are clean, the fades are consistent and the dynamic junctions with the adverts are the smoothest and most painless I’ve ever seen.


The player has all the usual features, with a couple of pleasing additions. When you share or embed content, you can select a specific clip or segment using in and out points. We’ve seen this before but of course it is well executed on Hulu. While watching a clip you can browse other content without interrupting the playing video, encouraging discovery and exploration.

The big step forward with the player is the way it deals with advertising.


A timeline shows when the ad breaks are and during the ad breaks there’s a countdown timer explaining ‘your video will start again in 5 seconds’. During an advert you can indicate whether you like or dislike this advert. It’s not clear the actual effect of this, but one would hope that it will lead to tailored ads. Adverts tend to come from the same advertiser throughout a programme, as if the programme is sponsored. This makes the whole experience feel much more cohesive than many other sites.

There are a lot of ads (less than watching the programme on US television though), but because Hulu is clear about when the ads are and how long they last for, as a viewer you really don’t mind. Hulu doesn’t commit the cardinal sin of showing me the same advert over and over again as I view different videos. When so often video advertising is a painful experience it’s refreshing to see it done well and bodes well for the future.

You can get this content for free in many places on the web. But doing so is generally illegal, takes ages and the quality is often poor. Why would you bother when you can go and visit www.hulu.com where it’s available for free, in beautiful quality and the cost is watching a few reasonably well crafted short ads?

Boing Boing picks up Protect the Human campaign

BoingBoing has picked up a cause being pushed now by Amnesty through the Protect The Human site which was launched last month. Troy Davis is scheduled to be executed in Georgia at 7pm local time on 23 September. He has been on death row for 17 years for a murder he maintains he did not commit.

One of the aims of Protect the Human was to give Amnesty UK a platform which allowed them to pick up on critical events and to react quickly, drawing attention to these types of causes.


From the number of comments about the issue on BoingBoing it's really amazing to see the site in action and working as intended. There is still a lot of honing and refining to do on Protect the Human, but it's all heading in the right direction.

Follow the conversation on Protect The Human, BoingBoing and join the other people helping to save a man’s life.

Keep up to date on Protect the Human and many other innovative projects (some of which are launching very soon)at Made by Many.

#5

My latest voodle. This is the MSC Napoli which went down off the Devon coast in January 2007. We're regular visitors to this stretch of coast, you can see in these Flickr pics how the ship's become smaller and smaller as chunks are blowtorched/blown off by the salvage teams.

Me & McCain

Me & McCain on 12seconds.tv

From 12seconds.tv - videos which are, yip you guessed it, 12 seconds long. I like the simplicity which you get when you only have a short time to work with.

Just how powerful is YouTube?

I've been doing some research recently into video syndication sites. I've spent some time poking around Tubemogul and they've got some interesting research papers on video distribution and codecs.

Of particular interest is the study Which Video Sites Deliver the Most Views?

YouTube is a clear winner, but the difference between YouTube and the competition is quite starling.


"While YouTube dominates the averages, sites other than YouTube still control a great deal of the audience out there. Adding up the site averages, a video producer could almost double their audience by also distributing to the additional sites listed."

Read the full paper.

London Calling

A few months ago we moved out of London to Bristol. To non-Londoners that might not seem a big deal but London is a hard place to settle in and having invested 8 years of my life there it was time to go. I've continued to work in the big smoke each week, mainly on Protect The Human, commuting each week and staying with a friend.

Having mentally made the break I could no longer Brompton. I'm not going to bore you with the details but the Brompton is fantastic and I can hardly imagine life without it now. I cycle to the train, fold it in up seconds and pop it alongside the suitcases. I reckon I've saved about £200 in two months and countless hours of travel time.

The Brompton is really nice to ride and as long as the tyres are pumped up hard I can keep up easily with most cyclists on London's streets. The fold mechanism is amazing and incredibly satisfying, here's a video showing how small it goes:



I have quite a few other essentials to help manage the commute, the most critical being a broadband dongle for the laptop. It's a 3 supplied dongle and works pretty well most of the time but is a bit variable depending on the phone signal. The image below shows everything the cycling train commuter needs for a couple of nights in London (the pic is annoted with notes if you visit the photo on Flickr).

Helping to Protect The Human

There has been a distinct lack of blogging action here for quite sometime now. Just over two months ago myself and my fiance packed all our London possessions and moved to Bristol. Since then I’ve been shuttling backwards and forwards working on a very exciting agile project for Made by Many and Amnesty International UK.


The timescales for the project were very tight and there were many obstacles along the way, but two weeks (we've been tinkering and fiddling since then) ago Amnesty UK’s new site www.protectthehuman.com went into public beta. The site aims to give a place for people to engage with Amnesty and Amnesty’s aims. The site is socially focused allowing users to view Amnesty video and image content and encouraging users to contribute their own views, opinions and content. Woven into the fabric of the site are proactive actions which are becoming increasingly important to Amnesty. Critically, standard activities such as commenting and rating are also considered and displayed as ‘actions’. This helps increase engagement with Amnesty and shows that small actions when taken by many people can have important effects.


My role in the projects started in the spring (before the rainy season) when I was engaged to carry out an impact assessment for the client in order to assess the impact such a service would have on the organisation. This led to me writing a Service Definition Document. This fairly hefty document was essentially a loose spec describing the areas of the site and how everything would hold together. This service definition document basically collated all the ideas for the service and translated these into a top level definition or spec.

Once the project was commissioned my role became more of a Producer. Throughout the life of the project I switched hats regularly covering project management, business analysis and to some degree interaction design.

The project management role involved working very closely with both Amnesty and technical partner and Ruby on Rails specialists New Bamboo. The design aspects proved particularly time consuming which left us with a large amount of template integration towards the latter stages of the process.


The business analysis role involved assisting Amnesty and Made by Many to translate their vision, aims and expectations into a service which could actually be built in the timescales allowed. The agile approach meant we did not define the entire site before we started developing but broke it down into feature areas such as ‘creating content’ or ‘groups’ and defined these as we progressed through the build. It's amazing to look back at features which we initially thought were critical but were superseded or became redundant as the project developed and evolved.

The project was highly agile, which meant that even if with the design difficulties we managed to the launch the project on time. I’m convinced that had this project been a traditional waterfall project we would probably still be weeks, if not months away from launch. Amnesty UK is a reasonably large organisation and the speed at which New Bamboo could develop forced decisions to be made in days rather than weeks. That’s not to say that we didn’t all learn a huge amount about how to run agile projects. I think agile puts a greater weight of responsibility onto the the individuals involved in the project, thankfully all those involved where highly skilled and produced great results. Well done to all those involved, in particular Max, Damien, Ismael, Paul and Rob from New Bamboo and Sara, David, Tom, Julia, Charlotte, Isaac and William from Made by Many.

Protect the Human is currently in public beta, and the site which is currently live is only the first release of what we hope will be a site which continues to develop and evolve new features and ideas.