Zac Echola is muffin but trouble

Say it: Cease and desist this thunder hair butt: Hulu.com

Published on 30/08/07
by Zac Echola

Clown Co finally has a name–and it sucks.

Don’t know what Clown Co is? It’s the much hyped, poorly executed online video venture from News Corp. and NBCU that was supposed to take on YouTube and other video sites. Bloggers and jokers in the media world dubbed the partnership ClownCo because they announced said partnership long before they had even hired anyone to execute it.

So, let’s get back to the shitty name, Hulu.com. Terry Heaton put it best:

This portal has been so hyped as God’s gift to online video that any name they came up with would likely have bombed, especially with the tech community — which includes the people who’ve written the book on online video without the “help” of the networks or studios. Old media just doesn’t get that new media isn’t created in a board room with fancy consultants (oh shit, I’m a consultant!), because the results are usually just varnished horse crap. Hulu? The first thing people did was research the word in various languages, and the meanings are almost too funny to believe. In Indonesian, it means “butt.” In Swahili, “cease and desist.”

Rather ironically, these were the reasons behind the name, according to Hulu.com CEO Jason Kilar:

Why Hulu? 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. Our hope is that Hulu will embody our (admittedly ambitious) never-ending mission, which is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premier content when, where and how you want it.

I also have to agree with Heaton and the commenters at Lost Remote that beyond thinking up a name with hilarious translations (have I mentioned yet how much I hate made up Internet names like flickr, twitter, tumblr, blogosphere, etc.?), a meatier list of partners would have been killer. Neither ABC nor CBS wanted to stick with the idea. CBS has its own InnerTube, and ABC is building video players for their affiliate sites.

All that said, I signed up for the private beta of the site, coming in October. Here’s hoping it doesn’t suck. We’ll know more if and when I get that invite. I hope Hulu.com isn’t as awful an experience as the Joost beta.

To be honest, News Corp. and NBCU own many of the television shows I love (and pay for through iTunes and on DVD, sometimes twice over). I think it will be a hit, despite the har-hars all over the tech and media blogs today.

The end. Or is it?

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