Last month, over 11.4 billion videos were streamed online. A pretty nice number for a fledgling media, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar said in a morning keynote at the OMMA Global conference in New York. He began by reminiscing about Disney’s (NYSE: DIS) theme parks and why it was so much better than other parks. It wasn’t the rides or the characters in costume, Kilar was struck by, but the street sweepers. “The Disney culture was obsessed with quality and street sweeping was one of the most important things about it. Walt Disney was inspired to create the theme parks after seeing the garbage at others. That obsession with quality has influenced Hulu. We obsess over every pixel in our service.”
– Stats at six months: Kilar then listed what caring about quality gets in you after just six months of operation: The company has 8 million monthly users, according to comScore (NSDQ: SCOR), with 119 million monthly streams; its videos have been embedded over 500,000 times on 27,000 sites.
– Advertising: let the viewers decide: Kilar believes that Hulu has a video ad format that makes pre-roll ads less annoying and more targeted. “We’re letting users self-select what sort of commercials they want to watch. He shows a screen shot of three different Nissan ads that viewers can choose to watch.” Kilar says if he’s in the market for a minivan, he can select that ad as opposed to watching one for a sports car. Hulu has also been offering choices between a longer form spot of a movie trailer or a shorter spot. If the users choose the longer one, they are spared further commercial interruption, which makes the ads more valuable, as consumers are clearly signaling their engagement.
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