Brainshark aims to improve how Eloqua customers use videos as a marketing tool, by improving their overall consumer appeal.
Video Marketing is Popular
Brainshark, is a cloud-based video marketing tool that provides users with the ability to share, track and improve their video marketing campaigns.
In a statement, Chief Marketing Officer of Brainshark, Andy Zimmerman explained that it's becoming harder for marketers to promote products. They not only have to present themselves in unique fashion, but create content quickly that's readily available for not only PCs, but mobile and tablet devices. With the addition of Brainshark Presentations into the Eloqua AppCloud, Eloqua users can use these video enhancement tools to improve on their consumer relationships and subsequently, their overall company sales and consumer reach.
Some of the features include:
Video content from Brainshark can be used with campaigns and landing pages created through Eloqua.
Users are able to track their video content and see who’s viewing it and what their reactions are.
Video can not only be created in Brainshark, but based on consumer feedback, Eloqua users can easily update and re-purpose the content.
Eloqua can use Brainshark’s in-depth analytics tool to have a broader sense where their marketing focus should be.
A Year of Changes for Eloqua
Eloqua , which recently became a publicly traded company, introduced a an automated marketing tool last month. The tool, called Eloqua Asset Management, is compatible with the Eloqua AppCloud and focuses on enabling managers and marketers to make their marketing automation solutions relevant to specific markets.
This new partnership with BrainShark isn't the only partnership venture for Eloqua, In July they integrated with salesforce.com’s Chatter. Eloqua users, whether or not members of salesforce.com, are able to use this feature without leaving the Eloqua platform. This new partnership between the two companies will give marketers the chance to develop more skills for communication and collaboration with their colleagues.
The video explosion is upon us. In fact, it actually detonated quite a while ago. I work with many clients, with predominantly larger enterprise DAM implementations, and a frequent topic of discussion among these organizations is, “how do I handle video within my company?”
Coming from a film studio background, managing video was a given, though we made great efforts to corral what types of video made it into the DAM system in order to control the usage and infrastructure impacts. Most companies will not face the same heavyweight requirements as a movie or a television studio; however, that may not make your job any easier.
Here are some tips to help plan for and manage video in an enterprise DAM environment.
1. Define the Categories of Video That You Will Manage
Understanding the business usage of your assets is important to drive governance, management and service; video assets or stills are no different in this regard. The maturity of video usage in your organization may determine how detailed and well understood these categories will be in your model.
If video creation and distribution is a norm, the categories will more likely be defined and understood. If video is a newcomer to your organization, you may need to define the categories as part of the preparation for managing video within your organization.
I suggest that these categories be organized by usage and include context in your specification or glossary documents. For example, "Product Overview" and "Used by Marketing to Create Online Campaigns." Importantly, the categories should tie back to or drive concepts that are present in your DAM metadata structure. For example, the above might have metadata applied to asset records as Video > Product Overview. This is a simplified example of two metadata fields, but it would allow the assets to be found via a search tool, while also limiting the visibility of the asset in a DAM system, if so desired.
2. Define the Technical Details of Video That You Will Manage
DAM systems are great at storing and delivering digital assets, such as digital photos and video. Similar to a digital photo, a video file may be saved in multiple formats, but video files add complexity. There are video file wrappers (e.g., MOV, Flash, MXF) and video compression formats (e.g., MPEG, h.264, ProRes) and it is common to have a combination, such as MOV wrapped h.264. The intention here is not to detail these formats, but to make the statement that understanding the details will help ensure support for your use cases.
For example, if there is a need to review and approve video within the DAM system but the video will not playback, the business requirements will not be met.
3. Define the Use Cases
This step starts with categorizing and is an additional level of detail that can fit into any methodology for implementation and management. Documenting and cataloging your use cases pays many dividends, especially ensuring that the functionality delivered meets the requirements gathered.
Following along the category from above “Used by Marketing to Create Online Campaigns,” the use case description might be “playback video to determine if appropriate for campaign.” This is a simple case that highlights how using clear classification and definition within use cases can benefit all those using the video file, especially during the upstream process within the marketing department.
Video brings complexities that may have an impact on the success of your DAM and the service provided to users. The steps outlined here can be thought of as a continuum or a loop, because users will iterate as they learn more and take on additional requirements. The steps are not unique to DAM, but the interdependencies of the steps are vital to DAM due to how closely the assets are tied to functionality.
Categorization, storage and delivery of data are the fundamental elements of managing rich media. While your company may not be producing full length features, governance of process and specifications will still yield benefits, no matter the scope of your efforts.
Jason Kilar’s vision for Hulu transformed web video. So why is Hulu in trouble and Kilar rumored to be on his way out? Because his vision transformed web video. Photo by Joe Pugliese
It's an unseasonably warm summer day, and Jason Kilar is "in the zone," as he puts it, buzzing around his Santa Monica, California, headquarters, putting the final touches on a massive redesign of Hulu, the streaming TV and movie service he runs. Despite the heat, and despite a deadline that is only weeks away, the boyish 41-year-old CEO looks calm and collected. (He always looks this way, actually.) He's dressed in his uniform of jeans and a dark blue T-shirt peeking out from under an über-starched button-down, and his thick turf of hair is cut in what looks like a $17 mow from Fantastic Sam's. As he natters on about the new site, walking me through its tray-style layout and a feature that lets you pick up exactly where you last left off watching a show, it's easy to see why people liken him to a grown-up Boy Scout. "This morning we had a 45-minute debate on the amount of gradient on the sticky header!" Kilar boasts, standing in a cluttered warren of darkened offices from which members of the design team periodically emerge, blinking like moles. Kilar's obsession with user experience--one source says it borders on "maniacal"--is a large part of why Hulu has created a service that customers have deemed "brain-spray awesome."
But as Kilar frets about the opacity of a tiny black line and the exact placement of a button, Hulu's corporate parents--News Corp., Disney, and Comcast/NBCUniversal--are fretting about Hulu. The day before Kilar's redesign was finally unveiled, Varietypublished excerpts from an internal memo that had been circulating among those owners. One of the bullet points: "Outline transition plan for new CEO. Discuss potential candidates and process." Kilar, who just three years ago was the wunderkind of digital media, now appears to be on the verge of being dispatched by his bosses--after which they may dismantle much of what he's created at Hulu.
The prevailing wisdom in business is that it's best to disrupt yourself before someone else comes along to do it for you. News Corp. and NBCUniversal had the foresight to start Hulu as Internet video was taking off in 2007. Thanks to Kilar's vision and leadership, the service has grown from a single website serving up last night's episode of The Simpsons to a service featuring content from more than 400 partners as well as original series from filmmakers Richard Linklater, Morgan Spurlock, and Kevin Smith. Revenue soared 60% last year, to $420 million, and is on pace to exceed $600 million this year. And despite broad consumer resistance to paying for digital content, especially when it's available elsewhere for free, Kilar has attracted more than 2 million people to Hulu Plus, a $7.99-a-month subscription service that offers full access to Hulu's library on an array of devices such as mobile phones, game consoles, tablets, and, most recently, Apple TV. Even more remarkable: He's serving ads to both free and paying customers, an industry-leading 46.4 ads per viewer per month, according to comScore's July 2012 online video rankings. Hulu's own stats suggest that 96% of those ads are watched in full.
Despite all that brain-sprayingly awesome news, the lords of television are having second thoughts about this whole disruption thing. The loudly noted woes of the entertainment industry aside, TV still generates more than $70 billion in advertising revenue annually. Cable companies still pay content providers like Disney (ABC's parent) and News Corp. (Fox's parent) tens of billions of dollars in licensing and subscription fees. Hulu's revenues are but a speck by comparison; but its audience, which now totals around 25 million unique visitors a month, according to comScore, is threatening. Network television viewership is down 12.5% since Hulu's launch in 2008, while approximately 3.6 million U.S. residents have abandoned pay-TV for Internet video over the same period. These metrics make studio and network people shiver, and Hulu bears the brunt of their alarm. "Half the people at those companies wish [Hulu] would go away," says one source who, like many of the dozens of studio execs, agents, producers, and Kilar's colleagues I interviewed for this story, asked not to be identified for fear of alienating any of the parties involved.
Kilar handpicked his team via "a bit of an Ocean's Eleven strategy," he says. Content chief Andy Forssell, left, and ad chief J.P. Colaco, right, were friends from Harvard Business School; CTO Rich Tom, center, knew Kilar through Hulu's original CTO, Eric Feng, a colleague from Microsoft. | Photo by Joe Pugliese
Hulu's owners and Kilar find themselves at this crossroad after years of long-simmering tensions and occasional battles. In the past few years, Hulu has shelved IPO plans, backed out of a sale, lost its key corporate supporters, and seen its partners sell rights to its rivals. The leaked memo was the third rumor of the summer that Kilar was on his way out. First, he was reportedly a finalist to be Yahoo's CEO; he killed that buzz by issuing a head-scratching statement that he "graciously declined to be considered" for the job. After that, he was going to work for Facebook. Press Kilar about all this Sturm und Drang, however, and all you get is his game face: "We've never grown so much in an absolute way as we have in the last couple of years."
Kilar will admit that his five-year journey at Hulu has "not been for the faint of heart." More palpitations are in store. This fall, Providence Equity Partners, the private-equity firm that has a 10% stake in Hulu and has generally backed Kilar, plans to sell its stake back to Big Media, leaving Kilar more exposed than ever. (Of course, he might also become richer than ever, given that he'll be able to liquidate stock options worth a reported $100 million.)
When I ask Kilar if Hulu is simply too successful for its owners' tastes, he throws his head back and laughs. "I don't know! You should ask them!"
I'd like to. No one at News Corp., Disney, or Comcast would comment for this story.
Hulu's saga, which has only been told in broad strokes and not since its honeymoon days of 2009, is one that Hollywood trucks in all the time. Kilar is the willful maverick who rides into town with fresh ideas and no interest in playing by the rules. On-screen, Hollywood loves this tale. In real life, it's a different story.
When Jason Kilar left Amazon in 2006, he was unsure of what to tackle next. So he rented office space in Fremont that became his own personal Fortress of Solitude to think big ideas. Over time, he developed ideas that would contribute to what became his "vision" at Hulu--of an elegant, clutter-free, easy-to-use video hub for all the TV and movies anyone could ever want, available whenever and wherever they wished. This vision is what drives him still; it's the one thing he talks about with a sincerity and genuineness that is not guided by MBA bullet points he picked up at Harvard Business School or by overcooked PR savvy. After Kilar got hired to run Hulu in 2007, he made it L.A.'s incubator for the future of video, a place where crazy ideas were not only scrawled on whiteboards but implemented.
He needed every bold idea he could get. Television studios detested the nascent world of online video. They saw YouTube as a haven for piracy. And while they had the sense that technology might force them to put content online, they shuddered at the thought of their high-production shows sitting next to short, clumsy low-tech vids of "cats on skateboards," as J.P. Colaco, Hulu's head of advertising, jokes about that era. A-list advertisers wanted nothing to do with such an environment, and the thought that anyone would ever pay to watch web video was laughable. Before Hulu even had a name, observers dubbed it Clown Co. The idea that two old-school media rivals, Fox and NBC, could collaborate on a startup and make sense of all this seemed insane.
But the observers hadn't reckoned on Kilar. His attention to detail made Hulu a success from the get-go. He made Hulu's video player larger than usual. He led the move to put content in HD. He let viewers watch fewer ads than they would on TV, and he let them swap out spots to watch others they preferred. "We wanted to draw an emotional reaction," says current CTO Rich Tom. It was all so risky, and it turned out to be all so smart.
"When we started, we had nine brave-soul advertisers who were willing to test it," Colaco says one day over lunch at Stefan's at L.A. Farm, a sleek restaurant within walking distance of Hulu's offices. ("Stefan" is Stefan Richter, the cocky Finnish-born finalist from season five of Top Chef--clips of which are available on Hulu.)
Now Hulu has served more than 1,000 advertisers, including top brands such as Geico, Johnson & Johnson, and Toyota. It delivers a very attractive demo of young, tech-savvy viewers with an average annual income of $75,000. (On Hulu Plus, it's $100,000.) And it commands a premium price for those spots, typically $30 to $35 per thousand views but even up to $50--close to 10 times what YouTube can charge.
"We've introduced a number of practices that have since become industry standards," Kilar says. "The Hulu team takes pride in exploring uncharted territory. It is who we are."
Few of those breakthroughs came without a fight. At his first meeting with senior Fox executives in July 2007, Kilar got an early taste of what he was up against. Instead of Kilar and his team getting an opportunity to talk about what Hulu might be, the meeting began with the network executives--a species famous for neither humility nor technological foresight--pontificating about the Internet "in animated ways," Kilar says. "After about 20 minutes, the head of the network waved his team to quiet down for 15 seconds so that at least I could introduce myself."
From the vantage point of the executives, it is Kilar who is the demanding and overbearing partner. Upon realizing that NBC and Fox were not going to allot him enough new episodes to create a meaningful warehouse of content, Kilar made a wish list of back episodes. When the networks told him that many of those programs either hadn't been digitized or had digital rights that were still frozen, Kilar continued to press. "There were some very uncomfortable phone calls," says one former Fox executive. "There was a lot of 'Jason, that's just not reasonable.'"
When thwarted, Kilar didn't think twice about vaulting up the ladder to make his case to the two men who hired him--Peter Chernin at News Corp. and Jeff Zucker at NBCUniversal. He usually got more, if not all, of what he'd asked for. Kilar has a talent for managing up. At Amazon, he was "kind of special," according to Jason Child, a former Kilar peer at the online superstore who is now Groupon's CFO. "Jeff Bezos loved him. He was one of the youngest people to be promoted to senior vice president."
Chernin and Zucker were protective godfathers. "I'm not sure everybody who worked at Fox necessarily agreed with me or loved what I was saying," Chernin remembers. "But ultimately, I was in a position to make the final decision. I just said, 'We're doing it.' " When ad sales executives at Fox and NBC complained that suddenly they were competing with Hulu for advertisers on fox.com and nbc.com, Chernin and Zucker batted them down. Ditto when competing network executives moaned that Hulu was yet another drain on TV ratings.
Not surprisingly, Kilar's relationship with Chernin and Zucker bred resentment. "Jason knew how to play Peter and Jeff off of each other like nobody's business," says a former NBCUniversal executive. "It's like he was going to his parents and saying, 'I got this from my other dad. You've got to give me that.'" A Fox source denies this, saying Chernin was always "very balanced" about the interests of Hulu and those of Fox.
Kilar was the "golden-haired boy getting all our content for free," says one former NBCUniversal executive, referring to the fact that Hulu did not pay NBC or Fox licensing fees for its shows. Instead, it gave them a share of ad revenue with no minimum guarantees.
Kilar further rankled the industry when he rejected older shows from the studio's libraries, because they did not meet his quality standards. In doing so, he ultimately forced the networks and producers to improve the way they encoded content. "Sometimes it takes a fresh point of view to realize these things," he says. But the us-against-them dynamic played into something that really grated on the network guys. "They were the cool, new thing and the internal businesses were seen as stodgy and traditional," says one source. So when the techie violated some of Hollywood's myriad unwritten rules, they let him have it. For example, when Kilar reached out directly to showrunners like Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy), network executives let him know that they didn't want him treading on their turf. But Kilar, as he so often did, wound up with the cool stuff. Whedon and John Cassaday released their graphic novel, Astonishing X-Men, as a "motion comic" on Hulu. MacFarlane created and starred in an ad for the service.
Kilar admits that "anytime you move away from the traditional norm in the media industry, there's going to be ruffled feathers, and I know that was the case in the summer of 2007." But he insists that he "spent a great deal of time listening to his new colleagues. "We would go visit everybody we could possibly meet, just to make sure people understood why we thought this was good for them as networks and as content creators," he says. Zucker, a renowned corporate politician, puts it this way: "I always thought Jason was very even-keeled about the fact that he had to deal with three media companies and one private-equity firm. I think he learned a lot of diplomacy in the process."
And he was successful. A clever Super Bowl ad in February 2009 that featured 30 Rock's Alec Baldwin as an alien who reveals that Hulu is actually a plot to turn humans' brains into mush sent Hulu's traffic soaring 42%. A couple of months later, Hulu added Disney as a stakeholder. Kilar lured hundreds of content partners and grew Hulu's library to 870 different TV shows and close to 500 movies. By the fall of 2009, Hulu had become the second-most-popular video hub online and the only one with a clear business model. Clown Co.? Not so much.
Hulu's swift rise minted Kilar as a superstar. His all-American looks and aw-shucks charm only cemented his status as a mogul on the make. He was not just a tech guy but a tech-media guy--a rare and very valuable commodity, then and now. He may have hailed from Amazon, but Walt Disney was his inspiration.
"I tried to do everything I could to study Walt Disney," Kilar says. "I would read every book I could on the company, and then I found out more about him as a person, as an entrepreneur, and it was just fascinating to me that this guy was able to live a great life with his family but also do these amazing things at work."
When he was 9, Kilar's dream came true. He and his family--he has five siblings--hopped in a "12-passenger cargo van" and drove from Pittsburgh to Orlando for a Disney World summer vacation. His memory of the trip is not of cool rides like Space Mountain, or what it felt like to be hugged by a larger-than-life Pluto, but, he says, of "the forced perspective of the architecture, how it all naturally led to Cinderella's Castle." In college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, according to his roommate Akbar Sharfi, Kilar threw himself most intensely into lining up an internship--and then a job--at Disney. In lieu of a cover letter, he created a comic strip starring himself.
This kind of deep passion makes Kilar a "product guy," a CEO who gets his hands dirty. It's an uncommon quality that he shares with people like Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and Marissa Mayer, the executive who did become Yahoo's CEO. But Kilar's microfocus is both his greatest strength and weakness. According to one Hulu source, "Steve Jobs could obsess about 200 of 400 details, and they'd be the exact right 200. Jason's more about two, and sometimes they are arbitrary. Like fonts. There are bigger issues to worry about."
When I ask Kilar about his granular focus, he grins, sensing an opportunity for a show. "Hey! Makiko!" he barks into one of the dark offices in the design area.
A petite Asian woman pops out, her eyes wide as saucers. "I have a question for you," Kilar says. "She asked"--he jabs his finger toward me--"if I spend any time on design and product at Hulu. You know, product details."
Makiko's face remains frozen. She seems to be considering whether she's about to get Punk'd. Then a big smile breaks out and she nods her head frantically up and down. "Oh, yeah! Yes! Yes! He's different from any other. He sees a change I've made and gets so excited. He's the first one to say, 'That's cool!'" Kilar beams. The grown-up Boy Scout just earned a merit badge.
At moments like this, Kilar truly lives up to his persona. As any Kilarite is more than happy to broadcast, he is the too-good-to-be-true boy next door, the kid from Pittsburgh who made it big out West, the family man who makes a point of going home to tuck his four kids into bed every night, and who wakes up at 5 a.m. to go running. He's so squeaky clean, he doesn't even drink coffee! "He basically has no vices," says Child.
There are no tales of Kilar delivering the kind of humiliating brow-beatings that make other CEOs infamous. "Jason is always in complete control of his emotions," says another former colleague. At Amazon, "Jeff [Bezos] would say things like, 'Okay, I just read this document, and it's pretty clear we're meeting with the B team. Is there an A team around here we can talk to?' That's not Jason's style. Jason's very direct, but he has a gift in that he can tell you that you suck, but he won't say it as crudely as 'You suck.' He's really got textbook management down."
Not surprisingly, Hulu employees truly do seem like happy campers, insulated from corporate warfare by their boss. The offices are stocked with every startup cliche in the book. Foosball table? Check. Beer tap? Check. This is a place where an Experience Team is dedicated to celebrating employees with Mylar balloons, cakes, and Hulu-branded onesies. As Laura Goldman, a member of the team, explains, "I do birthdays, babies, and anniversaries!"
To Hulu's media company partners, this approximation of startup life is an eye-rolling affront that has no place in Hollywood. "They had computers set up on cardboard boxes!" scoffs one source. And Kilar wasn't seen as a visionary but as a noodge with endless, perfectionist demands. "Things would escalate over small [stuff], like the placement of a logo on publicity materials," says one. "It was like, There he goes again."
Just about every person I spoke with for this article cites one day as the moment when the Hulu rocket ship changed course: June 30, 2009, when Chernin left News Corp. after failing to reach a contract agreement with Rupert Murdoch. "It was a seminal moment when Peter left," says one. "Not only was he a champion of Jason, he was a champion of the concept and the idea that Hulu could both have stand-alone value and help drive value for the content over time." Kilar acts upbeat when I bring up Chernin leaving. Even this, apparently, is an opportunity to make lemonade. "It was a big moment in our history," he acknowledges, "but we've gotten past it and our growth has accelerated since that time."
It's hard to find anyone else with that rosy view. One former Hulu board member describes the first post-Chernin board meeting as nothing short of a disaster. The gathering took place at ABC's headquarters in Manhattan, since it was also the first meeting since Disney had signed on. In lieu of the soft-spoken Chernin was Chase Carey, News Corp.'s new president and COO. A burly ex-rugby player (on the Harvard Business School team) with a handlebar mustache, Carey dominated the conversation. According to two sources, one Carey lieutenant, Jonathan Miller, News Corp.'s then-chief digital officer, leaned back in his chair and appeared to snooze. Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger, who has generally been favorably inclined toward Kilar and Hulu, seemed visibly frustrated as the conversation grew more prickly. And Zucker's influence was on the wane due to the upcoming acquisition of NBCUniversal by Comcast. (As part of the deal, the FCC ordered Comcast to give up any management say in Hulu to avoid a conflict of interest.)
"We were not in Kansas anymore," the former board member recalls. "It was a whole new [Fox] team, and it was not clear that they had any interest in supporting Hulu. It was more about protecting their own core businesses."
Carey's main point that day was that Hulu could no longer exist solely as an ad-supported business. It needed a dual-revenue stream, just like a cable or satellite TV network, a model Carey knew well from his six years as CEO of DirecTV. Cable companies like Comcast were paying content providers billions of dollars to retransmit TV shows, a shift that had occurred since Hulu was formed. Why, the cable companies wanted to know, should they pay so much if the shows were available on Hulu for free?
"Chase Carey was not supportive" of Hulu, says yet another former Hulu board member. "He put up a lot of roadblocks to progress." Soon after Carey's arrival, Kilar hammered out plans for a fee-based subscription service that would offer more content than was on regular, or "free," Hulu, and be available on more devices. Older episodes of shows would only be streamed on the pay service, called Hulu Plus.
Next, tensions flared over what the pricing of Hulu Plus should be, though Kilar denies that he threatened to quit over the issue, as was reported by The Wall Street Journal. "It's fair to say that there were disagreements about whether to go higher priced, in the teens, or at $10 or lower," he says. Kilar believed that Plus should be cheaper than Netflix's streaming service ($7.99 a month), but the media companies felt that such a measly price tag devalued their content. In the end, a compromise was reached at $7.99, but the battle gave Kilar a sense of what life would be like without his corporate benefactors.
In August 2010, Steve Levitan, the showrunner of the hit ABC sitcom Modern Family, let loose with an angry tweet. "Some estimate Hulu IPO could bring in $2Bil," he wrote. "What will the content providers get? Zero. What is Hulu without content? An empty jukebox."
Rumors had heated up that Hulu was headed for the public markets. The scenario was seen as a way to (a) turn a nice profit for Hulu's owners (the site was indeed valued at $2 billion) and (b) raise capital so that Kilar could go license and create more content. A public offering was also seen as a way to end the political infighting and provide a happy ending to a narrative that was getting more gnarly by the day.
To Levitan, though, the news was outrageous. Hulu cannibalized the TV audience for shows like Modern Family, he felt, and neither he nor the networks were being adequately compensated. Levitan even asked ABC executives to remove Modern Family from the Internet.
But if Kilar was frustrated by Levitan's outburst (the two men later reconciled over breakfast), he was more upset--disappointed is the word he uses--when plans for the IPO fell through that December. After months of discussions with investment banks, the media companies (News Corp., in particular, according to several sources) were uncomfortable signing long-term licensing agreements for their content. Before Hulu tabled the IPO, in fact, both ABC and NBC made deals with Netflix, giving Hulu's rival access to Lost, Saturday Night Live, and much more.
The IPO reversal was the first public sign that things might be in disarray. The second came a couple of months later, in February 2011, when Kilar took to Hulu's blog to write a 2,000-word state of the union titled "Stewart, Colbert, and Hulu's Thoughts on the Future of TV."
The post began by explaining how The Daily Show and The Colbert Report were now back on Hulu after a nearly yearlong hiatus that had resulted from a contract dispute with Viacom (which has no equity stake in Hulu). But Kilar was burying the lede. The essence of the treatise was to summarize what he saw happening in the new media space in Hollywood, including some harsh observations about his partners. Included in the post were pronouncements such as "Traditional TV has too many ads" and "History has shown that incumbents tend to fight trends that challenge established ways and, in the process, lose focus on what matters most: customers."
Never mind that these are, well, truisms. Hollywood took the public airing as a giant middle finger to Hulu's owners. And those owners were, predictably, furious. "The response was terrible. Terrible, terrible, terrible," says one former Hulu board member. "Everyone thought, This guy's a wild card." Both inside Hulu and in the media gossip blogs, speculation sparked that Kilar was begging to be fired.
When I ask Kilar if he in any way regrets writing the missive, he insists his intent was not to offend. "Of course, in hitting 'publish,' I anticipated that there was going to be a lot of talk about it," he says. "But that blog post holds up really well. When you read it, it's very obvious that it was a document that had been thought about for a long period of time. Nobody truly appreciated where we saw this world going, and what we were hearing from customers."
So was he surprised by the reaction of Hulu's owners? "Not in the precise, no," he says, before muddying his answer. "Because, I think, in the aggregate, based on conversations I had, frankly, there were a lot of people who said, 'That makes sense. That's a great summary of the landscape and where you're going.'"
An unlikely opportunity for all parties to save face emerged in June 2011, when Yahoo reportedly made an unsolicited bid to buy Hulu. Hulu's board opened up the sale process to any company that wanted to make a bid, and Google, DirecTV, Verizon, Microsoft, Apple, and Kilar's alma mater, Amazon, all were rumored to have at least considered an offer. But the talks collapsed for the same old reason: Hulu's owners refused to commit to long-term licensing agreements. The company was taken off the market in October, and a happy ending seemed ever less likely.
It's 9 p.m. on a Friday night, and Kevin Smith is lecturing a group of young men and women who have volunteered to participate in Spoilers With Kevin Smith, the movie-review show that the Clerks director hosts for Hulu. The group has just seen a screening of The Bourne Legacy at Universal CityWalk and they're about to be shepherded into the Spoilers studio, where they'll discuss the movie with Smith as cameras roll.
But Smith needs to clarify a few things first. "The likelihood of you saying, 'This movie's for cocksuckers' and getting that on the air isn't good,'" he says, dressed in baggy jean shorts that fall well past his knees and an orange-and-blue hockey jersey. "What are we? PG-13 or something?" he calls out to a huddle of Hulu executives off to the side of the room.
He goes through a few more rules (smile like crazy during his opening monologue) and scolds an audience member. "Sunglasses," he barks, "you can rock those in your pockets," before sauntering off stage. "Now I'm going to go upstairs and make myself pretty. Have more hairs put in my head."
Spoilers, which debuted in June, is part of Hulu's ambitious foray into original programming, Kilar's plan at forging a new identity for the streaming service. By investing $500 million into creating series, coproducing new episodes of British cult favorite The Thick of It, and licensing foreign programs such as the Israeli drama Prisoners of War (the forerunner of Showtime's acclaimed Homeland), Kilar is hoping to follow in the footsteps of HBO, or, for that matter, AMC. "Four or five years ago, AMC was known for just showing The Last Starfighter over and over again, or Some Like It Hot," says J.D. Walsh, the writer-director of Hulu's first scripted original show, Battleground, a mockumentary about political campaign staffers in Wisconsin. "Then they started making TV shows, and with Mad Men and Breaking Bad, now they're legit."
The strategy is anything but a sure thing. For one, Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube are pursuing the same path, armed with far more cash. Netflix, for instance, is spending $100 million alone on 26 episodes of House of Cards, a remake of the British miniseries directed by David Fincher and starring Kevin Spacey. YouTube, which has poured several hundred million dollars into seeding scores of original channels and is sharing advertising revenue with its partners, has lined up a roster that includes Ashton Kutcher, Amy Poehler, and Madonna.
Kilar describes Hulu's initiative as more of an indie thing, akin to Robert Redford's creation of the Sundance Film Festival, a place to "house storytellers and incubate their stories." And he has attracted idiosyncratic talent, like Richard Linklater and Armando Iannucci, the acclaimed writer-director of The Thick of It, by giving them great creative independence. But both he and his company have strong techie DNA and lots to learn about dealing with the egos and protocol involved in making, and not just distributing, a Hollywood production. (This is true for Hulu's rivals as well: Netflix and Fincher have reportedly been feuding about the budget for House of Cards.)
"I think Jason has to green-light shows, but he's not a development exec, so that's new territory for them," says one agent who was still waiting to hear on a project he pitched. "Things are just dragging. I'm told, 'We want to present it to Jason and Andy [Forssell, Hulu's VP of content] in the right way, but they're not so great at reading scripts.' These are things you don't hear out of network TV."
So far, Hulu lacks the kind of breakout hit that defines a network. Forssell says that this will take time, since, unlike the networks, Hulu isn't papering Sunset Boulevard with publicity billboards. The idea is to spend less money more efficiently, and mostly online, and to patiently develop a larger audience. And to use the new Hulu redesign to expose viewers to its originals. "I want to look at these shows on a two-year basis," he says. But that assumes Hulu still has a couple of years ahead of it.
"Hulu is everything we hoped it would be but were never really sure it could be," says Zucker, who now produces Katie Couric's daytime talk show. "It's almost shocking how successful the company has been." Chernin, Hulu's other founding father, is less bullish. "The world changes so fast," he says, pointing to the fact that at the outset he didn't have to worry about Hulu paying content creators exorbitant retransmission fees. While he still praises Kilar and still believes the entertainment business must invest to avoid the path of the music industry, he admits to a certain sympathy for the worries of old-line media companies. These business-model debates, he says, "are age-old and appropriate questions, which the media business should grapple with."
The leaked "transition plan" suggests that Hulu's current owners are doing a lot more than grappling. After Providence sells its stake, the media companies will supposedly revamp Hulu in a way that could prove intolerable for Kilar. The proposed changes include doubling the number of ads that run on Fox shows streamed on Hulu (not Hulu Plus) and letting competitors like YouTube have equal access to current-season shows. It's deeply ironic that the networks would now turn to YouTube, given that they created Hulu to fend it off. But YouTube is believed to generate six times more revenue than Hulu and remains the most popular hub for online video. Hulu regularly falls out of the top 10 list of most-visited Internet video sites, as ranked by comScore. No wonder the studios won't prize Hulu at the expense of their bread and butter--cable subscription fees and advertising.
Ultimately, Hulu might well get diminished to a site that's the equivalent of fox.com, which only makes episodes available for a limited time. Hulu Plus, with its dual revenue stream, might be protected. But while the subscription service could reach 3 million subscribers by the end of the year, "that's just not that impressive," says Dan Rayburn, principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan. As ratings dip, TV production costs soar, and video-streaming competition increases, the networks may well wind up having less command of the digital future of content than they did when they launched Hulu in 2007. And while Kilar still believes, deeply, in the future of a digital content warehouse that satiates millions of customers, much of his vision has been co-opted by others who are doing things bigger--if not necessarily better--than Hulu.
In the wake of all this drama, assessing Kilar's future has become one of Hollywood's favorite parlor games. "I don't think he has any intention of leaving until this plays out more," says a former Fox executive, "unless he gets forced out--though I very much doubt that, because it would look real bad."
But another source who knows Kilar says, "It's just a matter of time" until he decides his job has become too compromised. The consensus seems to be that Kilar and team will hang on until his network partners make things truly untenable. And with Providence gone, that time could come very soon. Still, Kilar's professional future remains bright: He's a star CEO in his early forties with five years' experience in one of the most challenging jobs on earth.
When I press Kilar on all this, he'll only say that he is not a "dabbler." The ruthless world of entertainment hasn't smothered his optimism. "So much ground has been covered since those first days when most everyone had a fear of the unknown," he says. "We're not yet at the stage where all content producers and executives think of online video distribution as naturally and obviously as they think of traditional television distribution, but we're certainly getting closer. If history is any guide, we'll get there."
For now, Kilar still seems to be enjoying the ride. At Hulu's Friday afternoon "wind down," he plops onto the floor amid a roomful of Hulugans as Lonn Lee, Hulu's director of product development and this week's wind-down host, welcomes the crowd. Goofily dressed in a Canadian Olympics hat with furry earflaps and a Team U.S.A. jersey, Lee gets the "Intern Olympics" started, joking that, "The most interesting thing about speed-walking is that it's a real sport."
Kilar claps his hands in applause and laughs. Here in the thick of what he's created, he seems genuinely happy, not to mention relaxed and unscripted. His vision may be battered, but it's not dead yet.
If you think the ramen-slurping garage-dwellers you see in the movies are what starting a business is really like, then you need to watch this video.
You don't need to own a business to be an entrepreneur. The definition of that word is morphing, as technology puts the fundamental tools for managing and organizing a business into anyone's hands. You can be an entrepreneur from within a corporate organization, or while still in high school -- it's become a way of life more than an approach to business. But as Lean Startup author Eric Ries points out in this week's Build-A-Business mentor lesson, most of us still tend to think of entrepreneurs as the ramen-slurping garage-dwellers portrayed in movies. "Everyone thinks they're crazy, and then fast-forward boom all of a sudden they are on the cover of magazines," he says. "But what makes you an entrepreneur isn't what kind of noodles you eat, but rather the context in which you operate."
So far we've heard from author Tim Ferriss about building a million dollar side business, Swissmiss creator Tina Roth Eisenberg gave us her 8 mantras for success, and FUBU founder Daymond John gave us his recipe for starting a multi-million dollar clothing business. It's all part of a competition that encourages anyone with an idea to start an online business. This year's winners will each get a $50,000 investment from the mentors. But finding your passion and turning it into a million dollar business? You'll have to do that on your own.
IT departments’ war to keep their assets safe resembles one of those alien-fighting video games, where new assailants keep swarming the bunker and you have to carefully — but quickly — choose your weapon.
But the number of threats, and the tools to combat them, are only part of IT departments’ problems. According to a Forrester Consulting study recently commissioned by IBM, 63% of companies have understaffed IT departments, and slightly more than half cannot find employees with the right skills to keep the intruders out.
CMSWire.com recently spoke with IBM Enterprise Security Executive Davis Puzas about that company’s view of the battle.
“There’s a new threat every single day,” Puzas said, adding that “it’s vastly different from just a few years ago.”
He noted that IT departments “used to be reactive” to threats, but now — given the amount of data being communicated, the rapidly morphing kinds of threats, the widespread use of clouds and social media, and the number and kinds of devices being used — they “have to be pro-active.”
Puzas pointed out that “you can’t just sit there and react — you have to leapfrog in front of the threats.” CIOs are looking for a “better view” of their battleground, he said, and they are looking “to become more intelligent.”
The Forrester study found that 68% of the surveyed 2400 North American and European enterprise decision makers had “little time for proactive and preventative projects due to existing responsibilities.”
Tools can help a company be pro-active, Puzas pointed out, but the intelligence arises from the people who implement them. “We find that many organizations are struggling to find the skills to take this on,” he said, and security professionals with the needed skills are now in heavy demand and “expensive to find, while budgets are tight.”
As one example, Puzas pointed to experts in mobile security, the most urgent battlefront for many IT departments. “They’re often just not available,” he said.
The Forrester study pointed out that “information security teams exist in an environment where ‘no’ is the wrong answer, yet the existing responsibilities absorb all of their time (68%) and new resources are hard to find (53%).” Given these conditions, the study said “consideration of security-as-a-service appears a clear and reasonable response.”
Security-as-a-Service
A 2011 report by Frost & Sullivan found similar evidence of the skills gap. It said that while half of its respondents reported having private clouds in place and 40 percent were using software-as-a-service, over 70 percent of professionals said new skills were needed to properly secure cloud-based technologies.
These kinds of stats, of course, represent continuing opportunities for IBM, given their strengths in security-oriented professional services and their managed services.
In 2006, one of the most vibrant social networks in the world was the photo-sharing site Flickr. By November, Google had purchased the video-sharing site YouTube for 1.65 billion. But lost in that year's community-content boom was a little company called Ear-Fi that hoped to do for audio what Flickr and YouTube had already done for photos and video. Founder Manolo Espinosa says, “Our idea was, ‘Hey how about setting up a platform that helps people tell stories as simple as talking, sharing as simple as clicking a button, and listening as easy as picking up a phone or computer?’”
It was an inspired notion. After all, in the broadcasting revolution of the previous century, radio came before TV. Why shouldn't there be a platform where professionals and non-professionals can share sound clips as easily as photos or video clips? And the timing was perfect, or so it seemed–-the financial crisis hit the following year, and Ear-Fi never made it through 2008.
Now Espinosa has a second chance to revolutionize how the web listens to itself. Last September, he became the “Head of Audio” at SoundCloud, the sound-sharing platform famous for its orange and blue audio player that lets listeners comment directly on a clip's waveform. First marketed toward musicians as a cleaner alternative to MySpace, SoundCloud wants to expand its user base to include anyone with a microphone connected to the Internet (which, thanks to smartphones, is now nearly half of American adults).
So what’s a non-musician’s SoundCloud page supposed to sound like? Some clues can be found on Espinosa’s own sound stream. There’s a minute-long clip recorded at a San Francisco Giants game capturing crowd noise, stadium music, and the cry of a food vendor yelling, “Peanuts!” Espinosa also recorded a short thank-you message to the organizers of #wjchat, a weekly journalism discussion group which Espinosa guest-hosted a few weeks ago. Dig deeper and you’ll find off-the-cuff recordings of lectures and presentations given by media heavyweights like the New York Times' Brian Stelter and Columbia University's chief digital officer Sree Sreenivasan.
None of it sounds professional, and that’s the point. “You get a fair amount of authenticity when you record someone’s voice," Espinosa tells Fast Company. "You get the background noise which helps with informal sharing of thoughts and ideas.” In a world where texting, tweeting, and chatting have all but replaced the traditional phone call, SoundCloud’s focus on the human voice is filling a gap not only in the digital space but in our everyday lives. Wouldn’t you rather your friend post a spoken birthday greeting on your Facebook wall than a perfunctory block of text or, even worse, an e-card? “We’ve had people who have recorded stories about their unborn kid and shared that with their family," Espinosa says. “About two or three weeks ago we found out (a couple) had proposed on SoundCloud. There was a collective hooray across the office. We’ve worked with big artists, but when we have a story like that, we’re just like, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’”
Journalists are another group not using sound to its full potential, Espinosa says. “When the Supreme Court had their health care debate, numerous news outlets referred to the fact that they were recorded, you could listen to them. But even a smaller percentage of those actually embedded the audio of that.” Beyond obvious uses of audio, Espinosa also encourages journalists to use SoundCloud like they use Twitter, to broadcast stray thoughts or to include interview clips or other sound content left on the cutting-room floor.
The biggest challenge for Espinosa’s team is convincing audiences that sharing and preserving sound is as worthy an endeavor for everyday people as it is for musicians, podcasters, and radio stations. The best ways to do that, Espinosa says, is to make SoundCloud compatible with as many platforms as possible (which it's already done so through recent integrations with Facebook and Flipboard), and to make the act of recording, uploading, and sharing sound clips as pain-free as Instagram makes photo-sharing.
[ Image: Flickr user Evan] Source : fastcompany[dot]com
IT departments’ war to keep their assets safe resembles one of those alien-fighting video games, where new assailants keep swarming the bunker and you have to carefully — but quickly — choose your weapon. 
Now Espinosa has a second chance to revolutionize how the web listens to itself. Last September, he became the “Head of Audio” at