My father was an electrical engineer who worked at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh. When I was growing up, my mother wrote humor columns for the local paper. She was the Erma Bombeck of Murrysville, Pa.
Jason Kilar
There's nothing more intoxicating than doing big, bold things.
I grew up hearing stories about how my maternal grandfather had put himself through engineering school in New York City. He saved money by walking down to a gas station once a week to take a shower. When I applied to college, both education and investment value were important to me.
When I was 10, we drove to Disney World. When we arrived, what impressed me most was the meticulous attention to detail; there wasn't a gum wrapper anyplace.
I took a job at the Walt Disney Company and after 18 months decided to go to business school at Harvard. I was awestruck by the campus. My first reaction was 'I don't belong here.' Then I said, 'I'm here; let's get on with it.'
History has shown that incumbents tend to fight trends that challenge established ways and, in the process, lose focus on what matters most: customers.
Hulu is about the shows, not the networks. The shows are the brands that users care about.
The Internet is going to have a bigger impact on content creators than the television ever had. The reason why that's the case is that suddenly you're able to tell stories 24/7 in the home, out of the home, in every room of the home. A television screen can be in your pocket through a smartphone.
When we blaze trails, which is what Hulu is about, it takes time. That is not for the faint of heart, and we understand that.
When you're dealing with digital goods, you don't have to be tied to one URL.
The one thing that's important to know is Hulu's not looking for traffic to be sent to hulu.com from its relationships with Yahoo and Fancast and MSN.
We're simple-minded, the team at Hulu, which is, we think if we can obsess over quality and build a better mousetrap, that good things will happen. Users will adopt the service, advertisers will see great value in it, and that's what we're seeing.
What I think about is what people spend their time on this planet doing. So No.1 is sleep, No.2 is work, and No.3 is sight, sound, and motion video consumption. Basically, four to five hours a day is what Americans spend consuming video.
At a macro level, it's balancing the needs of consumers, advertisers and content owners. And if you talk to any one of those three customer sets in isolation, often times you won't delight the other two. So the hurdle we faced with Hulu Plus was, how can we thread this needle in a way that delights all three customer sets?
Initially, the television was seen as the devil incarnate by people that worked in the content industry. Now over time it turned out that that was one of the best things that ever could have happened to a content creator. I think the Internet is no different.
Imagine you're watching '30 Rock' and an ad comes on, but you don't like it. With Hulu Ad Swap, you can actually click the button and trade out the ad. So for the first time ever, a consumer is in control of their ad experience. For us, it's a big win because users are able to take control of what they see.
When we launched Hulu, everybody was saying, 'Oh, this is going to be a substitute for pay TV in the living room.'
I think the relationship between cable and satellite and telco pay TV service providers and the content industry is a very, very solid one.
I'm not the kind of guy who dabbles in a lot of things.
We are fortunate to have collectively built a culture that matters, a brand that matters, a business that matters. It is impossible to state in words how much this team means to me, how much Hulu means to me.
