Our video catalog has grown to a size where tags will prove extremely useful. Tagging on Hulu is quick and easy. On each video or show page on our site, you’ll find a list of tags near the bottom of the main page or in the Tags tab to the right of the Discussions tab. Simply check the box next to any tags you think are appropriate to that video or show, or use the Add Tags entry box to add your own.

Click on any tag or enter a term such as “comedy” in the “Search with tags” box to discover other videos with that tag on Hulu. Narrow your search results by adding related tags — for instance, add “satire” to your comedy tag search to find videos tagged both “comedy and satire“.

Click on Your Tags to see all videos that you’ve tagged. Filter the list of all your tagged videos by selecting one or more of your tags listed in the left column. Using this feature you can create custom collections of videos.

One last note: while the beauty of tags is that there are no rules, we do have a preference for separating first and last names with a space, like “tina fey” instead of “tinafey”. That has to do with how we see people searching for names, though again, it’s not a requirement. We’ll also filter out any profanity and normalize your tags to lower case.

That’s it. Tag away! And do send any feedback our way — we’d love to hear from you.

Varun Narang (varun@hulu.com)
Product Manager

If so, we’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for sending information my way (jason.kilar@hulu.com) and we’ll handle the rest.

Jason Kilar (jason.kilar@hulu.com)
CEO, Hulu

You can find this page, which we’re calling “Coming Soon,” when you follow the “Browse by Date” link at the top of Hulu.com and then click on the “Coming Soon” tab. The schedule will consist of scripted currents from ABC, NBC and FOX, including such as favorites as Family Guy, FlashForward, The Cleveland Show, The Office, Bones, Fringe, Modern Family and more. We are hoping to add additional series to the list over time so you can keep up with your favorites.

Along with the schedule, there are a few new features that will help you manage your Hulu viewing. If you’re a registered user, you can request an email notification to alert you when a particular video has been added to Hulu.com. We’ll also alert you on the rare occasion when that video is late in getting up on Hulu.com. For bloggers and editors, you can also grab the code to pre-embed the video to your blog. (An example is pasted below.) We will swap in the video as soon as it’s available on our site, so you’re free to post your article on your own schedule.

Again, thanks for sending us all of your feedback about the site, and we encourage you to send your comments about Coming Soon to feedback@hulu.com. We hope you find this feature helpful — I know it’s definitely something I’m going to use.

Cheers,
Betina Chan-Martin (betina@hulu.com)
User Feedback Evangelist

Hulu Desktop for Linux
Since launching Hulu Desktop, we’ve read thousands of comments about the product. Among all the suggestions, there was one that far outnumbered all the others: our users wanted Linux support.

So while we were tweaking the user interface, adding a few keyboard shortcuts and fixing bugs on Hulu Desktop, we were also working on Linux support. Part of our commitment to help everyone enjoy content, after all, is to provide support to all three major computer operating systems. Hulu Desktop for Linux is compatible with both Ubuntu and Fedora distributions, and will support input from hundreds of infrared remote controls. (See the FAQ for more details.)

If you’re a Linux user and want to check out Hulu Desktop for Linux, you can get started here. Since this product is still in Beta, we encourage your feedback. Jump on our discussion boards to share your ideas, make requests and report any bugs to the Hulu Desktop team.

Hulu Publisher Tools
Designed for bloggers, site editors and webmasters, Hulu Publisher Tools makes it easy to browse and discover premium videos — from Hulu and other sites — to embed in articles and blog posts. In addition to content featured by the Hulu team, our publishing tool features a comprehensive directory that offers the opportunity to preview videos and copy embed codes from a single page. Editors can also create custom playlists for Video Panels that can embed multiple Hulu videos in a single unit.

A search bar lets you type in any keyword — “obama,” for instance — and we’ll call up all the relevant videos pulled by our web crawler. You can select a few clips that look good to you, preview them if you like, and copy the embed codes. And if all the content is from Hulu, you can put together a Video Panel in seconds and embed it on your blog, like I’ve done below with some recent clips from Modern Family.

Go to our Labs section to get started with Hulu Publisher Tools, and we always welcome your feedback via the discussion boards or by email feedback@hulu.com.

Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

Even in that time, the demand for marathon sessions of viewing existed. It just wasn’t easy. Sometime in the second season of The X-Files, I caught an episode on TV, loved it, and wondered how I could catch up on all the episodes I’d missed. The show hadn’t been syndicated and DVDs hadn’t been invented yet.

The Internet had, though, and so I went onto an X-Files newsgroup, explained my situation, and offered to pay to ship a whole series of blank VHS tapes to any fan willing to dub the first season and mail the tapes back to me. To my surprise, someone accepted, and a few weeks later, a huge box arrived in the mail. I spent an entire weekend locked in my room, curtains drawn, watching some 30 episodes of The X-Files back to back.

Soon after, DVDs and then DVRs hit the market, and, perhaps not coincidentally, studios started to issue TV series with long, serial plotlines that required that you to start from the beginning and keep up with multiple story threads, all intertwined. A TV series like 24 or Lost, with its complex plotlines, is more difficult to imagine in the age before DVD box sets, DVR subscriptions and Internet episode guides.

This trip through days of TV viewing past is a long way of introducing Continuous Play, a new feature we’ve added to Hulu today. Even in the on-demand world of online viewing, we see plenty of binge viewing as people work their way through multiple episodes in a session. Continuous Play makes this easier.

Though it’s a new feature, it’s built off some logic that already exists on our site. As you play a video from your queue, for example, we will pause for a moment when the video reaches its endpoint, and then move on to play the next video in your queue, automatically. Continuous Play expands this logic outside of the queue.

Now on every video player on our site, you’ll see a new Continuous Play bar under the video player. On the far right is a dropdown that shows what playlist of videos Continuous Play is working from. For now, there are three primary types of playlists. One is Your Queue, mentioned earlier. The next class is Collections, which have always been part of our site, but which now play continuously. The last type of playlist is more of whichever title you’re watching. If you’re watching a bit from Saturday Night Live, the playlist will be “Saturday Night Live” and will play more sketches from SNL in sequential order. If you’re watching an episode of 30 Rock, Continuous Play will play more episodes of 30 Rock in sequential order.

Just to the left of the dropdown is the On/Off switch for Continuous Play which does just what is says it does. If you click on a video from Your Queue, Continuous Play will turn on, and your queue will play one video after another, just as it always has. Select a group of videos from our Collections page, and Continuous Play will also turn on. Anywhere else on the site, we’ve left Continuous Play off by default. If you visit Hulu from the same computer, we’ll retain the on/off state of Continuous Play from one session to the next.

On the far left of our video panel, you’ll find the “next video” button. Clicking it will send you to the next video in the playlist. Hovering over the “next video” button will show the title of the next video to the right of the button, but if you want a visual view of the next videos in the playlist, click the “show playlist” button below the dropdown and a carousel will drop down, allowing you to browse the playlist and jump ahead to another video if you’d like.

Continuous Play controls carry over to full screen and pop-out modes as well. Give it a try and let us know what you think. If you’re looking for a suggestion as to where to start, try Lost. We have the first four seasons. Start with the Pilot episode, turn on continuous play, and some 84 episodes and roughly 62 hours later, you’ll have a good idea of how Continuous Play works (though you may have a lot of questions about smoke monsters, time travel and the nature of fate).

Eugene Wei
VP of Product
eugene.wei@hulu.com

P.S.: The title of my blog post is a reference to the novel by David Foster Wallace, which I finished recently as part of the recent Infinite Summer book group. In the book, Wallace writes about a film so entertaining that viewers lose all desire to do anything except watch the film again and again. I can’t help but think of that fictional film whenever I hear of someone who stayed up all night watching an entire season of a TV show.

To mark the onset of fall’s TV season, Hulu has just released some new Facebook applications that allow you to tune in to some of your favorite shows and share your thoughts with other Facebook users as you watch. The Hulu: Watch Now Fall Premieres app offers all of Hulu’s fall premieres — including shows from NBC, Fox and ABC — for streaming on Facebook as soon as they are posted to Hulu. And what’s Facebook without a status update or two? You can post real-time updates as you watch, sharing them with your friends and others via the Hulu: Watch Now activity feed.

If you’re a fan of specific shows, you may want to check out the Hulu: Watch Now apps for shows like The Office, Fringe, House, Family Guy, Heroes and more. You can bookmark these pages and come back to them to see fresh content throughout the TV season.

Also on the way: scheduled Facebook events for the show premieres, so you can plan a time to watch online with other fans on Facebook, no matter where you are in the U.S. The first one is coming on Tuesday for the Season 4 premiere of Heroes. You can also RSVP for upcoming events for other shows, including The Simpsons and 30 Rock, by following the event links from their Hulu: Watch Now app pages. To keep up to date on all of these premiere events, become a Fan of Hulu on Facebook.

Eric Yellin (eric.yellin@hulu.com)
Content Distribution

We’re back up and running, but if you notice any glitches, feel free to let us know on Twitter @hulu — as many of you already have — or by emailing our support team at support@hulu.com.

Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

Here are the reasons. First, we don’t ask a lot of our users to watch all of the content on our site, but we do ask that people be civil in our community areas, like reviews and discussion forums. While anonymity has many benefits to society, helping to maintain a civil community online is not one of them. One way of reducing the random offensive comments and troll activity is to ask people to stand behind their words with their real names. We’re under no illusions that this is a silver bullet (a thought that occurred to me recently as I responded to a user named Fred Flintstone, though perhaps his parents really did have an interesting sense of humor), but it’s something we require moving forward.

As with many online communities, most of our users are friendly and reasonable, but the rants of a minority of loud and belligerent few can overwhelm the voices of the well-meaning majority. We’ll continue to prune the reviews and discussion forums by hand, but we can no longer scale to handle the volume of user-submitted content coming in our doors each day now.

The other reason for this change is that we envision a future where online video viewing is more social than the solitary act it tends to be today, and without gathering real names from our users it’s hard to lay the foundation for that. Even with a user’s real name and location, it’s still often hard to tell who someone that wants to be your friend actually is, as I’ve learned with some of the outstanding friend requests I’ve left untouched on Facebook for several months now. Of course, participation in all of these community offerings on Hulu, from reviews and forums to future social features, will continue to be voluntary, but we think there’s room for some groundbreaking advances in online viewing in the future and we’re laying the groundwork for that.

This change applies only to reviews and discussion posts written since the new TOU and privacy policy went into effect. If you’ve written any reviews or posted to any forums since then and wish for us to remove them, feel free to point us at them via a note to feedback@hulu.com and we’ll pull them. (It’s most helpful if you can provide the Permalink URL to your post; this can be found by clicking on the “Permalink” link that appears to the right of your post.) We in no way want you to interpret this as pressure to write only good reviews of the content on our site, or to agree with every other user in our forums.

As part of this change, all of us at Hulu will be using our full names in all our communications with you, too. We won’t ask anything of you that we wouldn’t hold ourselves to.

Thanks,
Eugene Wei
eugene@hulu.com

Sure, we had glimpses of what was to come through appearances on The Tonight Show, The Today Show and the MTV Movie Awards (a moment Eminem will surely never forget), as well as the trailer. But those clips don’t give it all away — there are dozens of moments meant to offend, shock and poke fun at society as Bruno travels the world in search of fame. We’ll just let the fashionista speak for himself:

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

As I was considering what to say at our thank you session for Peter, it struck me how so many people across so many industries have such consistently high levels of respect for Peter. His teams respect him. His competitors respect him. His peers respect him. I suspect that Peter’s enemies, assuming he has some, even respect him.

But why do all these people respect Peter?

I can speak for Hulu and only Hulu in this respect. Peter once said that he learned long ago that it was never his or his teams’ job to protect existing businesses. Instead, the job was to maximize existing businesses while at the same time ensuring that seeds were planted and nourished for new businesses that could thrive in the future. So few leaders successfully pull off this combination which has defined Peter’s career to date. Why? For starters, planting seeds and nourishing those seeds is often hard, thankless work. The whole process takes way too much time for most leaders (3, 5 or even 10+ years). It is risky, uncertain and filled with a fair bit of failure. It is easy to criticize those who plant seeds, and there’s rarely any positive notoriety in those early stages. And yet Peter Chernin insists on planting seeds, because he knows that the rewards are atypically large over the long term for those who have the discipline to do so.

At Hulu, we recognize how lucky we are to have an uncommon leader like Peter Chernin associated with our crazy team. For the past two years, Peter has been making time to come over to our offices to help this company grow. He’s as comfortable coming over to our offices and sitting on the floor during a team meeting as he is with leading the charge at one of the top entertainment companies in the world. And on top of all that, Peter happens to be one of the truly “good” guys around.

Our respect and thanks to you as a leader, Peter. We look forward to sitting on the floor with you during various team wind-downs in the future.

Jason
CEO
jason@hulu.com

In honor of Peter’s Fox & News Corp tenure, we decided to place Peter’s Hulu jersey in the Hulu Hall of Fame, which some others might call the wall of our lobby.

Peter sharing his thoughts with the team on the genesis and future of Hulu.

Celebrating Hulu-style, complete with plastic glasses and a cake whose appearance leads me to believe our CFO made it.

Peter Chernin (front row 3rd in from the right) and the company he and Jeff Zucker put into motion.

Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Alec’s Second-in-Command

A lot has happened in our first 365 days as a publicly available service, including:

- We’re fortunate to now serve over 24 million users on a monthly basis (source: comScore VideoMetrix, January 2009).

- Hulu’s content library has grown 333 percent, from 12,000 videos in March 2008 to 40,000 videos as of today. Today it includes over 7,100 hours of premium video. If you start watching our library now and kept going, know that you’d be all caught up on the television shows and feature films offered by Hulu by roughly 4:07 a.m. on January 4, 2010. We’ll probably be adding some videos in the meantime, though, so don’t make any breakfast plans for that morning.

- We have grown from 50 content partners a year ago to over 130 today.

- The number of advertising partners we serve has grown in the past year from 30 to more than 175.

- Users are consuming more and more video on Hulu. Nielsen VideoCensus started tracking us in May of last year, and measured us at 63 million streams. Since that time, we’ve grown to 308 million streams in February 2009, nearly a 5x change in that 9-month period.

- Hulu content has been shared quite a bit this past year. To date, more than 3.9 million Hulu players have been embedded across more than 100,000 websites.

- By our estimates, since March 12, 2008, the Hulu team has consumed approximately 2,347 tacos from the unnamed taco truck that parks down the side street from our office. It is uncertain how many antacid tablets we’ve consumed in the same period.

We are incredibly excited by the response that users, advertisers, and content partners have given to Hulu. It is the greatest kick to be able to work with people you both admire and respect, and then, as a team, to doggedly engage to create something special. The whole team here takes nothing for granted, we realize we have so much more to do, and we will always remain appreciative.

Below are some photos of the Hulu team in the 365 days since our public launch. There is regrettably an absence of photos of Peter Chernin, Jeff Zucker, Salil Mehta, JB Perrette, Mike Lang, Dan Fawcett, Jonathan Nelson and Al Dobron. The folks I just listed are the lunatics from Fox, NBC/Universal, and Providence Equity Partners who have consistently stuck their necks way out there for us. Without them, Hulu would categorically not have been possible in the first place. We are lucky to work alongside them. The above crew and the Hulu team walked arm-in-arm during some dicey early days, kept on going, and have emerged OK.

On behalf of all of us, thank you to everyone for an incredibly fun first year. The adventure continues!

Jason Kilar (jason@hulu.com)
CEO, Hulu

Just like Ocean’s 11. The above photo is Eric Feng (Hulu’s CTO) and myself in Beijing on July 6, 2007. Eric had just agreed minutes earlier to become the second team member of what was to be named Hulu. He and I also agreed moments earlier to create a Hulu software development center in the city, which persists and thrives today. I ran back to the airport the day after this photo was taken and Eric joined me out in California a week later.

March 12, 2008. 1:46 a.m. Hulu is available to the public. Minutes after pressing the launch button, the Hulu team gathered for a photo in our southern California headquarters. In the very back with his arms up is Eden Li. Everyone always kids Eden about looking like he is only 12 years old. He’s actually 13.

Because that’s the way we roll. March 2008. Here is Brendan Haney getting thrown into the Pacific Ocean at our launch party. Nothing but love, except at this specific moment in time.

Winner take all, Spring 2008. I don’t recall what the bet was exactly, but I do recall that Rob Post most definitely lost the bet … and his hair.

Halloween 2008. This is Hulu team member Sean Chuang, who got dressed up as one of Hulu’s yellow walls on Halloween. As our legal counsel, this guy is our serious face to the outside world.

When not scouring the planet to secure great video content for Hulu’s users, Andy Forssell likes to channel his inner Brando here and there. Here he is on the back lot after a meeting with Universal Studios, playing “dead guy in the street.”

The evil plot is revealed. Super Bowl Sunday in the Hulu offices in California.

We call him Godfather.

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

In a series of marathon naming sessions, Eric, Christina, Eugene and I (shown below) generated, reviewed and debated a very long list of names, filling the whiteboard walls with dozens of possibilities last July and August. In doing so, we came up with a short list of interesting names and a much longer list of horrendous names. It turns out it’s much easier to think up bad names as opposed to good ones!

At some point during the marathon naming sessions, the name Hulu was suggested in addition to slight variants. Eric — who doubles as Hulu’s CTO — mentioned he had actually considered the name Hulu for an online video venture that he previously founded in China. In Mandarin, Hulu has two interesting meanings, each highly relevant to our mission. The primary meaning interested us because it is used in an ancient Chinese proverb that describes the Hulu as the holder of precious things. It literally translates to “gourd,” and in ancient times, the Hulu was hollowed out and used to hold precious things. The secondary meaning is “interactive recording.” We saw both definitions as appropriate bookends and highly relevant to the mission of Hulu.

As I mentioned several months ago, we were also excited about the name because it had no meaning in the English language. Given that we had aspired — and continue to aspire — to create a unique experience that is both worthy of remark and defies easy comparison, having a name with no direct definition appealed to us. For practical purposes, we also set out to have a relatively short, easy-to-pronounce name. And though we had done our homework — we were familiar with all the translations, both good and bad — we still wanted a name that was both approachable and fun. After all, we’re not selling life insurance or medical instruments here.

And so the name Hulu came to be.

Jason

jason.kilar@hulu.com

1:46 A.M. – Launch!

In these short 18 weeks since we began private beta testing, we’ve been working hard to kick the tires and check under the hood in preparation of opening the doors to our site. With well over 10,000 pieces of user feedback, we’ve heard your suggestions, comments, criticisms and praise. Today we are excited to leave our private beta and open Hulu.com to everyone in the U.S.. Our streaming video service is free – anyone in the U.S. with a broadband internet connection and a computer can just press play to enjoy.

We’ve also made significant additions to our content line-up. With the help of over 50 top content providers such as FOX, NBC Universal, MGM, Sony and Warner Bros., we’ve more than quadrupled the number of shows in our library, and on top of that, we’ve added 100 full-length movies. Hulu offers full-length episodes of not only current hit shows like The Simpsons and The Office but also classics like The Incredible Hulk, Miami Vice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in some cases, as with Arrested Development, Firefly, and Friday Night Lights, we have every episode ever aired. Our expanded library of full-length movies has something for everyone, from The Usual Suspects to The Big Lebowski, Me, Myself & Irene, Mulholland Drive and (one of my personal favorites) Three Amigos!.

While we’re excited about the progress we’ve made during the last 18 weeks, we are well aware that we’ve got a long way to go in our mission to help people find and enjoy the world’s premium content. As a frustrated media consumer myself at times, I know we still have much work ahead of us before we can confidently say that we are bringing all the great content that is out there to users on their terms. It won’t happen overnight, but I’m optimistic about the progress we’ve made so far and will continue to make. We’ll work closely with our content partners to bring you the best collection of premium videos on the web, and we’ll continue to develop and leverage technology to make media truly easy for you. Your feedback has been critical in shaping the Hulu service, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Jason

jason.kilar@hulu.com

P.S. For a longer and more eloquent description of the kind of company we aspire to be and the kind of ragtag crew we are, check out the personal blog of Hulu’s own Eugene Wei. He has a way with words, that Eugene.

We hope you’ll spread the word about Hulu so we can continue to gather feedback to improve our service. We’ve certainly learned a lot from the tens of thousands of comments, suggestions, and emails you’ve sent us and we look forward to hearing more of what you and your friends think. Drop us a line at feedback@hulu.com anytime.



Eric

eric.feng@hulu.com

We were on hand for the fun and festivities of the ceremony that featured industry heavyweights (like Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Rose), a terrific performance by the Richter Scales, and a very entertaining acceptance speech by Fake Steve Jobs. But the highlight of the evening for me – besides picking up the award of course… – was getting to meet MC Hammer (yes, you read that right) at the after party.

Again, on behalf of the entire Hulu team, thanks so much for your votes and we look forward to living up to these expectations in 2008.

Eric Feng (eric.feng@hulu.com)

Hulu is hiring. We’re located in sunny Los Angeles and are looking for people to join our growing team. In addition to mad scientist developers, we’re also searching for rock star sales people, attorneys, financial analysts, and other talented individuals.

Check out our new Jobs page for a list of our open positions. If you see something that you’d be a great fit for, send your resume to jobs@hulu.com.

Hope to see you soon!

Tom Fuelling (tom.fuelling@hulu.com )
CFO, SVP of Finance and Administration

PS. Here’s a short message from our head of recruiting… :)

The first bit of news we’d like to share is that we have a name: Hulu.

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.

The second bit of news is that we are now accepting sign-ups at hulu.com for invitations to our web site’s private beta. The Hulu private beta will be available in October. In the interest of delivering a great customer experience and making sure that we can address any feedback that comes along the way, we’re going to start small and grow iteratively in terms of the volumes of people that we invite to participate in the beta. Within that same timeframe, we will also be offering great programming through our distribution partner sites: AOL, Comcast, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo.

Ok, now it’s time for all of us at Team Hulu to get back to work! Don’t forget to register your email address for the upcoming private beta.

Jason Kilar (jason.kilar@hulu.com),
CEO, Hulu