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.

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

The most prominent change is cosmetic, as we have moved away from our former two-column grid and have given prominent placement to the show you’re most likely searching for. You can subscribe to the show, check on its availability, and get a brief description of the show, but you can easily pinpoint a specific episode using the browse tools to the upper right of the results. For current shows, such as Better Off Ted or America’s Got Talent, we’ll default the most recent episode; for older shows, like Miami Vice, we’ll highlight the pilot episode (or the first episode we have if the pilot is unavailable). You can browse through the episodes available there, or scroll down the page to check out all the videos that match your search.

Your results can be refined using the filter menus — display only clips or full episodes, or sort by relevance or airdate, for instance — and those of you looking for closed captioning can opt for the “cc only” option, which will call up results with that feature, if any related videos are available.

These changes are carried over to our Most Popular and Recently Added pages. And because we really do listen to your feedback, we’ve modified things so that multiple clips or several episodes from a particular season of a show are now collapsed into a single entry that you can click on to expand. That way, you can easily bypass the videos you’re not interested in, but still easily to delve into the content you do care about, like the latest clips from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

And finally, from the Time-Based Search page in Hulu Labs, you can also search for videos based on date and then use the Video Type filter to display clips or full episodes only.

Now that you’ve read all about these new features, give them a try and let us know what you think: send your feedback to feedback@hulu.com.

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

To help us learn from user feedback even earlier in our development lifecycle, we’re excited to open up a new Hulu Labs section on the site today. At Hulu Labs, we’ll provide sneak peeks at some of the upcoming releases from our product roadmap, some of which are personal projects and hobbies our devs have been cooking up. From new recommendation algorithms to tools for building custom widgets to a time-based view for browsing your favorite shows, we’ll be sharing a variety of these new creations with you at Hulu Labs and looking forward to your thoughts on how to make these products better.

Headlining our Hulu Labs release today is Hulu Desktop, a new downloadable application that allows you to find and enjoy your favorite Hulu videos in a rich, full-screen computer window that you can control with your mouse and keyboard or any six-button PC or Mac remote control. Hulu Desktop was built by a small group on our engineering team (two devs, one designer, one product manager) who asked themselves one day: how can we make it easier for users to immerse themselves in the great shows and movies Hulu is fortunate to have access to? Our answer was to build a new PC and Mac application that gives users the option to step outside of their browser, keyboard and mouse and into something different. We’ve always aspired to provide the best video viewing experience possible on your “lappity-toppity boxes” and make online video more fun to watch. And working together with our media partners, we hope Hulu Desktop is another positive step towards building a legal, long-lasting service that earns us the right to continue serving you.

As with other Hulu Labs projects, Hulu Desktop is still in beta and undergoing changes, but we’re excited to give you this early look and hear what you think. Please share your feedback with us — the good, the bad, and the ugly — anytime on the Hulu Labs discussion board.

Eric (eric.feng@hulu.com)
CTO, Hulu

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

Big day! I’m happy to announce that The Walt Disney Company is going to join us in our admittedly ambitious mission. The specifics are in the official release below.

As a Hulu team, we are over the moon for a number of reasons. Yes, we are excited to help audiences and great shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives find each other via Hulu. We also are excited at the many ways this can enable us to better serve advertisers. But perhaps most importantly, we are smiling big today because we are honored to be working with a company that quite frankly inspired us from the very start of Hulu. Walt Disney was a founder, an innovator, a person with an atypically high quality bar, and someone who was maniacal in his obsession to delight his customers. Hulu has always taken great inspiration in that example and the culture Walt Disney created (which Bob Iger and his team carry forward and push to new levels).

It is such a thrill to work alongside such a great team in Disney. I believe that cultural fit, that similar focus, is going to be the source of many good things to come for our users, our advertisers, and our content partners.

Big Day!

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

DISNEY TO JOIN NBC UNIVERSAL, NEWS CORPORATION AND PROVIDENCE EQUITY PARTNERS AS AN EQUITY OWNER OF HULU

Full Episodes of Hit Current and Library Programs Like Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy, Dancing with the Stars, Ugly Betty, Private Practice, Scrubs, Wizards of Waverly Place, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, General Hospital, The View, Greek, The Secret Life of the American Teenager And Other Hit Series From ABC, ABC Family, Disney Channel and SOAPnet To Come To Hulu.com and Its Distribution Sites

LOS ANGELES, CA – April 30, 2009 – Hulu and The Walt Disney Company today announced that Disney, through its subsidiary ABC Enterprises Inc., has agreed to join NBC Universal, News Corporation and Providence Equity Partners as a joint venture partner and equity owner of Hulu, a leading online aggregator of video content. Upon closing, the agreement will enhance Hulu’s programming line-up through the expanded online distribution of Disney’s most popular current and library primetime series and library feature films. In particular, full-length episodes of hit current and library programs like Lost, Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Private Practice, Ugly Betty, Scrubs, Greek, Hope and Faith, Less Than Perfect, Wizards of Waverly Place, Phineas and Ferb, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, General Hospital, The View and The Secret Life of the American Teenager will soon be streamed on Hulu on an ad-supported basis.

“From our landmark iTunes deal to our pioneering decision to stream ad supported shows on our ABC.com player, Disney has sought to meet the constantly evolving viewing habits of our consumers, and today’s Hulu announcement is the next important step in that ongoing journey,” said Robert A. Iger, president and CEO, The Walt Disney Company. “Disney and Hulu share a focus on delivering the highest-quality entertainment experience and we look forward to working with Hulu to build value for our consumers, our brands and our shareholders.”

“We’re honored to welcome the Disney team in our mission to help people find and enjoy the world’s premium content, when, where and how they want it,” said Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu. “With the addition of shows like Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy and many more to Hulu, we continue to aspire to deliver a service that users, advertisers and content owners unabashedly love.”

Following the closing, content available to Hulu users will include:

• • Full-length episodes of ABC primetime programs like Lost, Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty, Samantha Who, Scrubs, Private Practice and popular late night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live
• • Full-length episodes of hit ABC Family series like The Secret Life of the American Teenager and Greek
• • Popular series from ABC Daytime and SOAPnet like General Hospital and The View
• • Classic series from ABC’s library like Hope and Faith, Less Than Perfect, Commander in Chief, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and Dancing with the Stars
• • Select hit programs from Disney Channel like Wizards of Waverly Place and Phineas and Ferb which can be easily accessed from a new DISNEY location in the Channel section of Hulu.com
• • Popular library titles from The Walt Disney Studios
• • Short-form content including webisodes, sneak peeks and episode recaps from ABC Entertainment, ABC Family and SOAPnet

“Hulu, quite simply, now has the best premium content on the web,” said Peter Chernin, president and chief operating officer, News Corporation. “With three major networks and over 150 leading content providers providing content, combined with the best video user interface anywhere on the web, Hulu offers consumers the finest premium online video experience available today.”

“Hulu has shown that if you make quality content available on the web and combine it with an unbeatable user experience, viewers will come, and so will advertisers,” said Jeff Zucker, president and CEO, NBC Universal. “The addition of some of the best content Disney/ABC has to offer will only enhance Hulu’s standing as a top site for high quality video entertainment.”

Jonathan M. Nelson, CEO of Providence, said “Hulu is creating significant value for users, advertisers and content owners. This balance, together with aggregated professional content and an expanding base of over 200 brand advertisers, is establishing Hulu as a compelling online video monetization platform. Hulu is a bright spot in the new media landscape.”

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory review. As an equity partner, Disney will have three seats on the Hulu Board that will be held by Mr. Iger; Anne Sweeney, co-chair, Disney Media Networks and president, Disney/ABC Television Group; and Kevin Mayer, executive vice president, Corporate Strategy, Business Development & Technology. All other current directors from News Corp, NBC Universal and Providence will remain on the Hulu board.

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.

We apologize in advance for the inconvenience, and we’ll have the site fully functioning as soon as we can. Thanks for your patience.

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor

Later this week, Hulu’s content will no longer be available through Boxee. While we never had a formal relationship with Boxee, we are under no illusions about the likely Boxee user response from this move. This has weighed heavily on the Hulu team, and we know it will weigh even more so on Boxee users.

Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes. While we stubbornly believe in this brave new world of media convergence — bumps and all — we are also steadfast in our belief that the best way to achieve our ambitious, never-ending mission of making media easier for users is to work hand in hand with content owners. Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner websites.

Our mission to make media dramatically easier and more user-focused has not changed and will not change. We will not stop until we achieve it and we are sober in our assessment that we have such a long way to go.

The maddening part of writing this blog entry is that we realize that there is no immediate win here for users. Please know that we take very seriously our role of representing users such that we are able to provide more and more content in more and more ways over time. We embrace this activity in ways that respect content owners’ — and even the entire industry’s — challenges to create great content that users love. Yes, it’s a complex matter. A tough mission, and a never-ending one, but one we are passionately committed to.

For those Boxee users reading this post, we understand and appreciate that you’re likely to tell us that we’re nuts. Please know that we do share the same interests and won’t stop innovating in support of the bigger mission.

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

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

If you missed Quantum of Solace in theaters over the weekend, get a taste of the action by previewing its trailer, also featured in Hulu’s Movie Trailers section, home to previews of upcoming releases, current hits and recent blockbusters. It’s a great way to get a feel for what’s coming to a theater near you and, like other videos on Hulu, you’re free to email your favorites to friends, post them on your MySpace or Facebook page, or embed them on your personal website.

Shaken, not stirred,

Rebecca

rebecca.harper@hulu.com

Editor

A year later, some things have changed. We have many more users, content partners, and advertisers. Our catalog has ballooned many times over. To support this growth, we have many new faces in the office. We like to think the taco truck that stops by during our lunch hour added our street to their itinerary to support our growth.

When we visit college campuses on recruiting trips and say we’re from Hulu, people no longer ask “What’s that?” or think that it’s a province of China (speaking of recruiting, if you are a great developer or know one who enjoys sunny weather, long walks on the beach, eating contests, Rock Band, ping pong, and foosball, do I have the place for you!). With a few moments to catch our breath, we painted our walls, hung some art, and moved the ping pong table from the hallway into its own room.

Some things haven’t changed. We still eat a lot. We have one day of the week dedicated to donuts and another to bagels. The remainder of our waking hours are powered by those freakishly large containers of various foodstuffs from Costco. Our mission hasn’t changed: we still want to make it easier and more fun to watch the shows and movies you love unabashedly, the ones you love in secret, the ones you don’t know you love yet, and even the ones you don’t love at all. Against that mission, we’ve made some progress, but we still have so much more work ahead of us than behind us. There are no “mission accomplished” banners hanging in our offices, only whiteboards filled with new ideas, designs, and to-do lists.

But on this, our first birthday, we wanted to thank some people. We want to thank our content partners, because without their willingness to clear content for us and their belief in the future growth of online distribution, none of this would be possible. We want to thank our advertisers, who help us to keep our content free for users and to fund our operations and growth. Their understanding of the value of presenting their products and services to our users is the second leg of the tripod that supports our business.

The third leg of the tripod is, of course, all of our users. Thank you all, not just for visiting our site and watching our videos but for your tens of thousands of e-mails offering suggestions, criticism, and support. Above all, we count on word of mouth for our growth. Thanks for being both our conscience and our advocates.

Lastly, I want to thank my coworkers for their hard work and around-the-clock passion. As we have employees stationed from the East Coast to the West Coast in the U.S. and on the opposite side of the world in Beijing, keeping up with them is truly a 24/7 job. I serve at the pleasure of a world-class team.

Most of the Hulu team, a year ago, just after the site launched in private beta:

Eugene

So what happened? Well there’s been some interesting theories about this that our users tweeted about during our outage including:

1. DanStasiewski: Hulu appears to be down. Should I get on the roof and wiggle the antenna?
2. JoeAnderson: Maybe bringing down Hulu.com will finally get me into the Evil League of Evil.
3. MattMusgrave: With Hulu down, productivity sky rockets.
4. benfortney: I think hulu said something bad about the chinese gov’t.
5. (and another one) benfortney: I blame the Republicans for taking out Hulu.
6. demosthe: Stale DNS cache maybe?

If you guessed #6, then you’d be correct. Around 6:45pm, we accidentally deployed an incorrect DNS record and this change was cached out to public DNS servers causing all *.hulu.com domains (including our email server, SVN depot, the whole kitchen sink) to resolve into the ether.

With the help of our guardian angel (thanks Phil!), we fixed the DNS change but then had to wait helplessly for it to fully propagate which took a bit of time, during which we kind of felt like this:

Our sincere apologies to all the users this outage affected and hope things are back to normal for you. If not, drop me a line and we’ll get you back up and running too.

Thanks again for your patience and understanding.

Eric “Got a lot of explaining to do” Feng (eric@hulu.com)

This week gets off to a great start with Lost in Translation, Sophia Coppola’s Academy Award-winning film about two lost souls who cross paths in Tokyo. It’s a gorgeous movie, one that I love not only for the sweet, sad and funny way it tells the story of Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and Bob (Bill Murray), but for the way it juxtaposes the contrasts of Japan itself: quiet and serene in hotel rooms and shrines; brash, colorful and loud on city streets. And then there’s Bill Murray’s character: a washed-up movie star who comes to Japan to film a whisky commercial, a nuanced performance I’d never expect from this guy:

Want to know more?

Visit the Hulu Days of Summer calendar page to see what great new videos have launched thus far, and check the blog daily for more details about each day’s premiere.

Rebecca

Editor
]]> http://blog.hulu.com/2008/06/16/welcome-the-hulu-days-of-summer/feed/ 2 http://blog.hulu.com/2008/06/15/happy-father-s-day/ http://blog.hulu.com/2008/06/15/happy-father-s-day/#comments Sun, 15 Jun 2008 19:54:52 +0000 Eric Yellin http://blog.hulu.com/2008/06/15/happy-father-s-day

Having a new baby in the house can be exhausting — and with a new arrival in the house, I know this firsthand — but it’s one of the greatest feelings in the world. But because it’s nice to have a reminder, I’ve been using what little downtime I have to enjoy our new Just for Dads collection, put together just in time for Father’s Day. The clips — including great fatherly moments from Family Guy, The Simpsons, 30 Rock and Field of Dreams — are just the right length for a busy dad like me. Check them out, and share your Hulu favorites with dad on Sunday.

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there!

Eric Yellin
Hulu’s Proud Papa