Comments from the Hulu Chief

Posted by melting on Apr 29, 2009

Jason Kilar recently made an apearance on Tech Ticker sitting in an interview with Sarah Lacy, a well know technology reporter. This three part series shed a little insight into Hulu’s balance between the users, the content creators, and the advertisors.

One could argue the only customer in the equation is the advertisers since they are buying the product. The advertisers are paying for the eyeballs of millions of viewers. Along these lines Jason discussed about his high CPM rate over traditional TV broadcasts. Hulu seems to be going where few startups these days are, and that is tackling monetization from the start. Jason likens Hulu to that of early TV shows that have a lower ratio of ad time to content. Hulu certainly is in a dance to please advertisers as well as users and content providers.

As far as users are concerned there were a few items that Jason could did not divulge. Many in the tech industry are hoping for a wonderful iPhone app. This could likely be a challenge due to the lack of a flash plugin or available API on the iPhone. As an aside, Jason please create this iPhone app and leak the story to me

Finally, though Jason did not talk directly about how his investors (Fox and NBC) are viewing his product, but didn’t seem to show signs of tension.

Apple big in smart-phones or big in phones?

Posted by melting on Apr 26, 2009

Ever since Apple wowed the world with it’s iPhone and follow on iPhone 3G everyone was wondering what market share would be stolen from Microsoft Windows Mobile and Symbian OS’s as well as RIM, Nokia, HTC, Samsung, and others.  As many have pointed out over the last year and half the iPhone is a growth engine for Apple.   It is gobbling market share for the smartphone market left and right.  

In Q4 of 2008 calendar year Apple grabbed 10.7% of marketshare of the worldwide smart-phone industry.   This is some feat for a company that wasn’t in the cell phone industry, which some thought to be a crowded market, two years ago.  

Despite all of this growth it still only has 1.5% of global cell phone market.  It doesn’t seem to be Apple’s mojo to cut capabilities in products and sell them at low end prices.  

Two trends that do start to make some sense when I try to come up with my own strategy if I were in El Jobso’s Tim Cook’s shoes are netbooks and predicted smartphone growth of 6% for 2009.  

First 6% growth for smart-phones in 2009 seems like a small number, but in context this is huge.  Most industries this year are  at best predicted to stay the same or contract so this market is going to continue to head up.  So why would Apple want to look down to the basic handset market that is likely to become even more heavily commoditized? 

Second huge opportunity is netbooks.  While I think this is a dirty word for Apple it points to some pretty cool opportunities.  First netbooks are typically rather slow and operate in a diminished capacity.  If you spin this and retool the name to something like iTablet or iPod Touch HD then you may get somthing interesting.  

So if you put these two trends together you may start to get to a  strategy that we can see in June.  Perhaps a new type of device that can get its mobility from the iPod world and its power from the Mac lineup then we can see something that can truly bridge the gap.   The other thing this does nicely is allow the current iPhone 3G be sold at lower pricepoints, perhaps even $99, which would drive this market share even higher.  

Since I am quickly becoming an “Apple Fanboy,”  I certainly hope so.

YouTube, getting paid

Posted by melting on Jun 1, 2008

Even though YouTube has only been around for about three years there has been longtime speculation on if they will ever make money. Advertising on YouTube has had very minimal success with many differing problems. Advertisers aren’t used to user generated content that some of their customers may find offensive. Users tend to balk when they get overcrowded by advertising and navigate away from the site.

Forbes’ article bring very vague numbers which in and of themselves are not very interesting. Much like this article, they don’t really site where they get the information or how they draw there conclusions. The numbers sure can be very dismal. YouTube has had tremendous growth and is almost ubiquitous for certain types of video. The article points to data that 30% on internet videos are served by YouTube, yet they will only get 15% of the targeted 775 million this year and 1.35 billion next year in online video advertising revenues.

These numbers are telling of the current viewership of this type of business. 350 million and growth of 75% aren’t bad and will soon prove to be enough for Google to be right in purchasing YouTube. But if I could guess I think 3 things will improve the monetization of YouTube. Channel growth will continue to grow. Advertising on pages particular to individuals will grow because advertisers will continue to get used to how to monetize user information. Lastly Google will increase revenues by leaning on its true business, search.

Search for videos will help twofold. First is using the tradition Google search page will get its traditional pages. Where search can improve is when their users click YouTube from the “more” section it only takes you to the YouTube homepage. Better monetization of YouTube via search will be key.

Thanks again to TechCrunch for linking to a nice article by Forbes.