On January 9, we removed nearly 3 seasons of full episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. We did this at the request of the content owner. Despite Hulu’s opinion and position on such content removals (which we share liberally with all of our content partners), these things do happen and will continue to happen on the Hulu service with regards to some television series. As power users of Hulu have seen, we’ve added a large amount of content to the library each month, and every once in a while we are required to remove some content as well.
This blog post, however, is not about the fact that episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia were taken down. Rather, this blog post is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to how we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these Sunny episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.
Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed. I’d like to point out to our users that the content owner in this case — FX Networks — was very quick to say yes to our request to give users reasonable advance notice here, despite the fact that it was the Hulu team that dropped the ball. We have re-posted all of the episodes in the interest of giving people advance notice before the episodes will be taken down two weeks from today. The episodes will be taken down on January 25, 2009. Unfortunately we do not have the permission to keep the specific episodes up on Hulu beyond that. We hope that the additional two weeks of availability will help to address some of the frustration that was felt over the past few days.
The team at Hulu is doing our best to make lemonade out of lemons on this one, but it’s not easy given how poorly we executed here. Please know that we will do our best to learn from this mistake such that the Hulu user experience benefits in other ways down the road.
Sincerely,
Jason Kilar (jason@hulu.com)
CEO, Hulu
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[...] Feed, which helped quell the anger. Hulu’s response to the Sunny in Philadelphia uproar was incredibly quick and just as important, [...]
I am impressed that Hulu took the blame for this one. One of my friends told me that I had to hurry up and watch It’s Always Sunny before it went back down. It’s great! So thanks for the extension.
So, is FX asking Hulu to remove ALL of the episodes of Sunny? Because the day that I found out that everyone was furious at Hulu there were “rolling” episodes.
Are they just removing them all outright, or “rolling” them?
Also, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is one of Hulu’s most watched and most popular shows. It seems kind of foolish for FX to want to remove it, seeing as it gives them publicity and Ad views.
Hi Jason,
This is refreshing and well-written. I wrote a post about your apology on our company blog. Please check it out when you have a moment. Thanks for listening.
http://www.markyr.com/what-every-ceo-can-learn-from-hulus-jason-kilar
Best,
Marjorie Kase
Co-Founder
MarKyr Media
http://www.markyr.com
Since it is obvious that Hulu actually does listen to its viewers feedback, I just wanted to say thank you for this very reasonable solution to this problem. I was halfway through the 4th season when IASIP went to rolling episodes on Jan. 9th. Thanks to Hulu and FX for giving Hulu viewers a chance to watch the latest season before it is taken down.