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Damn, did you see this note on Hulu.com?

I must say it's pretty damn refreshing to see such candor from Hulu's CEO. It's blunt, strait to the point and doesn't contain corp talk BS that you often see from CEO/PR culture. 🙂

I don't care wtf the actual issue is. People will bitch about pretty much anything and CEO really didn't have to come out in such personal manner. And I give him props for that.

link

Customer trust is hard won, easily lost.

On January 9, we removed nearly 3 seasons of full episodes of ''It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.'' We did this at the request of the content owner. Despite Hulu's opinion and position on such content removals (which we share liberally with all of our content partners), these things do happen and will continue to happen on the Hulu service with regards to some television series. As power users of Hulu have seen, we've added a large amount of content to the library each month, and every once in a while we are required to remove some content as well.

This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ''It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia'' were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to _how_ we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ''Sunny'' episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.

Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed. I'd like to point out to our users that the content owner in this case - FX Networks - was very quick to say yes to our request to give users reasonable advance notice here, despite the fact that it was the Hulu team that dropped the ball. We have re-posted all of the episodes in the interest of giving people advance notice before the episodes will be taken down two weeks from today. The episodes will be taken down on January 25, 2009. Unfortunately we do not have the permission to keep the specific episodes up on Hulu beyond that. We hope that the additional two weeks of availability will help to address some of the frustration that was felt over the past few days.

The team at Hulu is doing our best to make lemonade out of lemons on this one, but it's not easy given how poorly we executed here. Please know that we will do our best to learn from this mistake such that the Hulu user experience benefits in other ways down the road.

Sincerely,

Jason Kilar, CEO, Hulu
 
The Hulu people are geniuses, and have the most brilliant way of handling their site from its inception. Kudos to you, Hulu. Kudos.
 
I use hulu for a couple shows but only because I don't want to wait the 5-10 mins to download the torrent (@ up to 2.5MB/sec) instead. This guy is speaking like people are paying for his service. I suppose he has that mentality and good for him... as well as the users. But I think he's also a bit overboard in his apology. It's a tv show, not someone's financial information that suddenly got wiped.
 
I welcome the change in business-to-end-user communication style that Google piloted. Rewarding companies who speak candidly and admit their mistakes encourages them to continue doing that, often meaning they can fix mistakes more quickly. Overly-professional correspondence comes off as almost disrespectful nowadays, making the company seem like they don't do the customer the courtesy of letting them in on important information. Props to Hulu for taking the risk.
 
Originally posted by: rh71
I use hulu for a couple shows but only because I don't want to wait the 5-10 mins to download the torrent (@ up to 2.5MB/sec) instead. This guy is speaking like people are paying for his service. I suppose he has that mentality and good for him... as well as the users. But I think he's also a bit overboard in his apology. It's a tv show, not someone's financial information that suddenly got wiped.

Well by visiting their site you are paying his salary, so I would assume he might give a damn about pissing people off or not.

I wish more shows would be put on Hulu. NBC/ABC, and I would assume CBS, although I don't watch any of their shows so I wouldn't know (I might would if they were on Hulu though) streaming all suck comparatively.

Oh, and have you not noticed that people are crazy when it comes to stuff like this?
 
A&E never even acknowledged their viewers existence(even thought they emailed and repeatedly asked for a simple explanation of what happened on A&E's own forum) at all when they yanked 24 from rotation a long while back with no notice and right in the middle of a season. :|
 
Originally posted by: Clair de Lune
Originally posted by: NSFW
Gotta love a company that freely admits to screwing up!

Enjoy before they get big enough and behave like rest of the CEOs (and understandably so.)

Hulu was founded in March 2007 by NBC Universal and News Corp and is operated independently by a dedicated management team with offices in Los Angeles, New York, and Beijing. Hulu closed a $100 million investment from private equity firm Providence Equity Partners in October 2007.
 
a letter by the CEO saying they screwed up royally because they didnt send out a notice to the users that the show was going to be removed from hulu??? i dont get it....
 
Heh, I remember Jason Kilar from the days he was an SVP at Amazon.com. He seemed like the kind of person to say that.

Another thing I remember about him - when many senior execs are asked specific questions most of them delegate those questions to their subordinates. Jason always seemed to know the answers (including the numbers).
 
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