NBCU, Fox Name Their Net-Video Baby: Hulu
JV Partners Pick ‘Short, Easy to Spell’ Moniker, Set October Beta Launch
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 8/29/2007 9:21:00 AM
Five months after announcing their Internet-video joint venture, News Corp. and NBC Universal finally have settled on a name for the company -- Hulu -- and said they will launch an invitation-only beta version of the site in October.
Initially, the beta version of Hulu will be open to a limited number of users, the companies said, and will continue to grow as the JV’s development team scales the site and address user feedback.
Previously referred to as NewSite, Hulu is supposed to offer “thousands of hours” of full-length broadcast and cable TV shows, as well as movies and other video clips. Eventually, according to the companies, Hulu will likely include original content.
In a note posted Wednesday on Hulu.com, CEO Jason Kilar -- the former Amazon.com executive hired in June to run the Los Angeles-based JV -- explained the genesis of the name: “Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we're building.”
News Corp. and NBC Universal have inked content-distribution deals with various cable networks, including Comcast's E! Entertainment Television, Style, G4, Versus and The Golf Channel, Oxygen, Fox Cable Networks’ Fuel TV and Speed Channel, Sundance Channel, Gemstar-TV Guide International’s TV Guide Channel and CNET Networks.
Visits to Hulu.com alternately showed logos for FX's The Riches, Dirt and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Fox's 24, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? and KVille, and NBC's The Office and Heroes, among others. Presumably, content from these series will be available, but JV officials have yet to declare exactly what content will be streamed on the site.
The joint venture also has distribution deals with Comcast, AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo, which the companies claimed represents 98% of the monthly unique visitors on the Internet in the United States.
