iMedia: In terms of social media, Hulu recently debuted Hulu Friends. Tell me a little bit about this launch.
Kilar: We were very careful on day one, when we launched Hulu originally, to have a large amount of community and social features. When you take a look at people's reviews of Hulu, they're actually less focused on what I think are some of the most helpful social and community features on the web today. And that's the notion of taking premium content, be it a feature film or TV show, and being able to edit it down to just the segment you like, take it with you, share it with your family and friends, put it in your blog, send it in an email, etc. That's just one of at least a half dozen social and community features that we launched with on day one.
Hulu Friends is one more step in a long journey of making the user experience that much richer in terms of being able to find and enjoy great content. Friends will enable you to discover content that you may be interested in that you did not know existed.
iMedia: News Corp.'s Peter Chernin was a huge advocate for Hulu. What does his departure mean for your company?
Kilar: Not enough good things can be said about Peter Chernin. He's a superstar by any definition. Perhaps counterintuitively, Hulu is in a good position for the future because of Peter Chernin.
In the very earliest of days, folks like Peter Chernin, Jeff Zucker (NBC Universal), and Jonathan Nelson (Providence Equity Partners, a Hulu financial backer) stuck their necks way out there when the rest of the industry, quite frankly, was very skeptical about what was called NewCo, and eventually became Hulu. In that period of time, it was critical to have someone of Peter Chernin's stature and leadership to defend us and be able to protect us, and to enable innovation to happen. Innovation is a very fragile business. Startups are a very fragile business. Peter provided that protection and that cocoon of sorts, and it was a wonderful thing to have.
So for almost two years -- keep in mind that we started coding the service in July 2007 -- Peter Chernin, Jeff Zucker, and Jonathan Nelson have provided that leadership and that protection. It's because of that that Hulu became a service that can stand on its own. We went from having two content partners to having over 130 content partners. We started with no advertisers, and now we're serving over 175. We went from having a brand that no one really knew at all to having a brand that truly matters to over 25 million users on a monthly basis.
iMedia: How do you see Hulu's business model evolving in the coming years? And how will the eventual expiration of the two-year exclusive lock on NBC and Fox content affect the company?
Kilar: We never talk about the financial or contractual specifics of the business. I've seen a lot of speculation about that externally, but neither I nor anyone else inside of Hulu has ever spoken on that. It really is rumor and speculation.
But I will say that, in terms of the company that is Hulu, there's a tremendous amount of evolution in front of it. And it's completely predicated on being obsessed with our customers and innovating on their behalf. So we have quite a lot of plans for the future, and obviously we're going to listen very carefully to our customers along the way.
I think it all comes down to how we execute on behalf of our customers. If we serve our customers well, then we earn the right to do creative things.
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