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Archive for February, 2011

An Idea Worth Spreading (To Your Living Room)

February 28th, 2011 by Andy Forssell SVP of Content

There are times in business when you get to do things that that just seem right. I’m lucky that I have a job where this is fairly common. And today is definitely one of those times.

Hulu’s mission is to help our users find and enjoy the world’s premium content when, how, and where they want. And we think you would be hard pressed to find content more premium than the TEDTalks from the prestigious TED conferences. Incredible people. Amazing ideas. With the launch of our partnership with TED today, it’s our honor to offer millions of Hulu users 50 of the most popular TEDTalks from the last few years. More are coming soon, including select new talks from the 2011 TED Conference that’s just about to begin.

For those of you who are not familiar with TED, think of TEDTalks as a smart and concise way to explore new ideas and gain exposure to concepts and innovations you may not have ever seen before, all in 18 minutes or less. All TEDTalks share a common thread: ideas worth spreading as told by the most inspiring and passionate doers and thinkers around. Through Hulu and Hulu Plus, we hope to extend the reach and impact of TED, because the more people who hear and understand an idea, the more powerful that idea becomes. To introduce these talks, which focus on technology, entertainment, and design, I’ve included a few of my favorites at the end of this post.

All TED content on Hulu will be available on Hulu.com and on the Hulu Plus subscription service. Through Hulu Plus, it is now possible for TED fans to watch TEDTalks on demand, in HD when available, in the living room and on mobile devices. It’s a whole new way to experience TED. We hope Hulu Plus users gather family and friends in the living room to watch the talks together through their Internet-connected TV, gaming console, Blu-ray player, or set-top box, and then have a conversation inspired by what they just saw.

Many thanks to our friends at TED for doing what they do so well, and for letting us be a part of getting this great content seen in new ways.

Andy Forssell ()
SVP Content & Distribution

Sir Ken Robinson talks about the importance of creativity and how schools can kill it.

Aimee Mullins talks about her 12 pairs of legs, completely turning inside out the idea of disability.

Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen. An absolutely amazing and entertaining look at what incredible stories data can tell.

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Last comment: about 10 hours ago 1 Comment

The Oscars: Make Your Picks

February 22nd, 2011 by Ben Collins Assistant Editor

Finally, there is a little place to appropriately register all of our unenlightened and maliciously biased Oscar picks together.

Nope, it’s not Heaven. It’s Hulu’s Oscars section, where HitFix.Com’s Editor-in-Chief Gregory Ellwood makes his eerily well-informed predictions for every category of Sunday’s Oscars. And, better yet, you can vote right along with him in order to keep a record of your masterful, near-psychic abilities come Sunday night.

Or you can use this opportunity to vote against someone who looks exactly like the girl who relegated you to third place in a sixth grade spelling bee.

We’re looking at you, Hailee Steinfeld.

Then again, maybe you have valid reasons for voting for someone. Maybe you got completely swept up in a film and find it to be criminally underrated. Maybe you’re voting for a movie because you desperately want to see all Hollywood movies go in that direction, even though they probably won’t. Maybe you’re filing down each category and wantonly clicking “Toy Story 3” because the old dog in that movie made you weep big, animated crocodile tears and led you to scurry out of the theater in a pathetic mess of nostalgia and tissues.

You know. Maybe.

So go make your picks. Register your support for all of your favorite movies and stars. Vote early, often, passionately, and mostly for Melissa Leo.

Ben Collins is an Assistant Editor at Hulu. You can email him here or reach him on Twitter @globesoundtrack.

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Last comment: about 15 hours ago 3 Comments

Find More to Watch with Hulu Recommendations

February 17th, 2011 by Peter Sargent Product Manager

Hopefully you’ve benefited from Hulu’s recommendations in the past, whether we’ve helped you get reacquainted with an old favorite TV show or introduced you to a new movie on Hulu. For logged-in Hulu users, the recommendations engine takes into account all kinds of factors as it suggests shows that you might enjoy — including videos you’ve watched, commented on, or told us you’ve enjoyed in the past.

Now we’ve made it even easier for you to find great shows and movies with our new recommendations hub. You can easily access your recommendations right off of the home page navigation bar. Think of it as a personal shopper that will point you to great entertainment, tailored to your specific tastes.

Enjoy! And as always, let us know what you think on our discussion board.

Peter Sargent
Product Manager

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Last comment: about 13 hours ago 2 Comments

A gift for movie lovers: Criterion Collection joins Hulu Plus

February 15th, 2011 by Eugene Wei SVP, Audience

My earliest movie exposure was heavily influenced by what my father could find at the local video store. He’d stop there on the way home from work and pick out one of new releases from the display of empty video boxes that lined the outer walls of the store. And so my early love of movies grew largely from a diet of American Hollywood blockbusters because that’s what dominated the most coveted merchandising space at our local video stores.

After college, I moved to Seattle, and some movie buffs I met there introduced me to a video store called Scarecrow Video. This was unlike any video store I’d ever encountered. It was enormous, carrying seemingly every movie ever put on video in any format, from VHS to laserdisc to DVD, including PAL videotapes and foreign region DVDs that required renting special machines to play. These were movies from all over the world, in all languages, sorted not just by new versus old but by country, director, and genre. It was at Scarecrow that I rented my first Criterion laser disc. Most of them were so rare that the store required a credit card deposit of several hundred dollars just to walk out of the store with the movie.

But it was worth it. The Criterion Collection is likely the preeminent distribution brand in the minds of movie buffs. They’ve earned that title in two key ways. One is by curating and licensing rights to a library of truly great, enduring movies. Secondly, when they bring those movies to the world, they do so with an attention to detail and quality that can only come from the purest love and respect for movies as an art form.

That’s why we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve added the Criterion Collection exclusively to our Hulu Plus service today. Criterion has digital streaming rights to over 800 of the films in their library, from a who’s who roster of directors: Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson, Bunuel, Chabrol, Chaplin, Clouzot, Cocteau, Dreyer, Eisenstein, Fassbinder, Fellini, Godard, Kaurismaki, Kieslowski, Kurosawa, Lang, Malle, Ozu, Renoir, Tati, Truffaut, Varda, and Welles, to name two handfuls. We’re launching with over 150 Criterion movies today, and we’ll be adding more titles each month. Among the launch list today are so many acknowledged classics: The 400 Blows, L’Avventura, The Battle of Algiers, Breathless, La Jetée, Jules and Jim, M, Pickpocket, Playtime, Rashomon, Seven Samurai, La Strada, and The Wages of Fear.

But just as exciting are the titles still to come. These include not just more well-known classics but also movies that have been difficult or impossible to find on video in any format. Le Silence de la Mer, by one of my favorite directors, Jean-Pierre Melville. The extended filmography of Kenji Mizoguchi. Early shorts by Chaplin. L’Assassin Habite au 21, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s first feature. This doesn’t even include the supplemental content Criterion is famous for and which we’ll bring to the Criterion experience on Hulu Plus over time: commentaries, documentaries, interviews, original trailers, essays, and more. Many of these will be digitized for the first time. We’re honored to partner with Criterion to make all this cinematic treasure available to movie lovers, critics, and historians alike.

Movies, unlike most of our TV programs, aren’t shot with ad breaks in mind, and it has always been tricky to find opportune moments to inject ad breaks in movies on Hulu.com so that we can compensate content owners while maintaining the optimum user experience. For Criterion, thanks to our advertising partners, Hulu Plus subscribers will be able to watch the Criterion Collection free of interruption. (Any ads will play up front.) For those who don’t have a Hulu Plus subscription, each month we’ll still rotate a few Criterion titles through Hulu.com with our normal periodic ad breaks.

The first set of Criterion movies are already available across all devices supported by the Hulu Plus service. On the web, you’ll find Criterion on Hulu at www.hulu.com/criterion. Please dive in and let us know what you think!

Eugene Wei
SVP of Audience

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Last comment: about 8 hours ago 42 Comments

A Long Time Coming

February 15th, 2011 by Peter Becker CEO, Criterion

It’s not often that you get to say you are going to meet millions of new people on a single day while making a wish come true for many of your oldest friends, but that is exactly what is happening to the Criterion Collection today, as we go live with a major new offering on Hulu.

When I first started working at the Criterion Collection about seventeen years ago, I remember coming across a file box full of typed and handwritten letters that viewers had sent to Jon Mulvaney, our longtime customer liaison. At that time, the company was sometimes referred to as the “Rolls-Royce of laser discs” — an honor, to be sure, but one that was meaningful to a vanishingly small sliver of the American public. Many of our editions sold hundreds, not even thousands, of copies, at prices as high as $125 for a single film, but we had a very dedicated audience of movie lovers who had come to value Criterion for our commitment to quality, and for the array of special features we had pioneered starting in 1984, when we published the first ever commentary tracks and special features to appear alongside motion pictures.

It is tempting to say that a lot has changed since then, but the truth is, even more has remained constant. We don’t make laser discs anymore, but we are still dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and using the latest technology to present them in editions that will deepen viewers’ appreciation and understanding of the art of cinema. Customers still write to Jon Mulvaney all the time, but now instead of pens and typewriters, they send him e-mail or post to our Facebook page or Twitter.

When I think back to all the letters I read that day, I realize that even the subjects of those letters haven’t changed much at all. Most were and are passionate pleas for us to release a favorite film or seek out a particular director’s work, but then, as now, one of the most common requests was for some kind of subscription program that would give customers access to everything we put out.

Starting today, there are more than 150 of our most important films online on the Hulu Plus subscription service. Over the coming months, that number will swell to more than 800 films. For the true cinephile, this should be a dream come true. On Hulu Plus, you’ll find everything in our library, from Academy Award winners to many of the most famous films by art-house superstars like Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Federico Fellini to films so rare that they have never been seen in the U.S. in any medium. Some of these lost gems have been so hard to see that even most of the Criterion staff will see them for the first time only when they go live on Hulu Plus! Each month, we’ll be highlighting a mix of programs, centered on themes, directors, actors, and other creative artists, as well as celebrity picks, and mixing them with deep cuts from the catalog that will be unknown to all but the most prominent cinephiles in the world.

Criterion has always been a company driven by its mission, not by any particular medium, and while we still see our core business as producing the world’s best DVD and Blu-ray versions of the world’s best films, this new venture with Hulu represents a huge expansion of our reach. Not only will Hulu users have access to the largest digital archive of Criterion movies for the first time, Hulu Plus subscribers will now be able to stream our films (and yes, before long, many of our supplements too!) on a wide array of devices, including iPhones, iPads, PlayStations, and Internet-connected television sets.

And finally, why Hulu? In short, because they get it. As their regular viewers know, the Hulu user experience is exactly what it should be: simple, elegant, and focused on the content. Hulu has built their brand on letting the shows and movies take center stage. Nobody does it better, and we’re honored that they see Criterion as a good match for their audience. We’re going to do all we can to make the experience of Criterion on Hulu Plus an exciting adventure for all of us, so please check it out and let us know what you think.

Peter Becker
CEO, Criterion

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Last comment: Jan 20th 2012 9 Comments


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