New York — The Internet-video streaming hub Hulu is the latest website to jump into the social networking bandwagon online, in anticipation of creating user loyalty and mining data to attract more advertisers, now allows its members collect friends lists much like a standard social-networking service, the site said last week. Hulu is now celebrating its first anniversary on the Web, and everybody is invited.
Hulu, a joint venture of General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal and News Corp., celebrated its first anniversary on last Thursday by launching a new social networking feature on its site that gives users free online access to TV shows and other videos, which networks and other suppliers provide in exchange for a cut of the Web site’s advertising revenue.
The newly launched feature on Hulu’s Web site — brilliantly named Hulu Friends — that combines social networking tools along with the site’s expansive video content.
“Hulu Friends,” incorporates features much like the social networking sites Facebook and MySpace, besides e-mail providers Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, and allows users to see what their friends are watching, share new videos and leave notes for each other. For example, the Hulu “Scorecard” will allow users track their activity. Competitors in the online-video market, such as Joost and CBS Corp.’s TV.com, have introduced similar functions.
So users can now invite friends through their Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail accounts, or plug-into the huge friend collections of MySpace and Facebook to lure buddies onto couches for quality TV viewing. You can share videos and leave notes on other user accounts. Using a newsfeed similar to Facebook’s, Hulu Friends can circulate what you and your friends have been watching and who you have befriended. This feature can be turned off as well.
The new features are intended to encourage Hulu users to connect with one another and share their video preferences, said Hulu Chief Executive Jason Kilar. If the strategy works, it could increase their viewing, boosting the site’s ad revenues.
Kilar declined to comment on whether Hulu is profitable.
Hulu, which streams television shows and movies for free, still has a long way to go if it expects to beat out Google-owned YouTube.com. According to Internet tracking site comScore, YouTube accounted for about 43 percent of all videos viewed over the Internet in January. By comparison, Hulu.com had only a 1.7 percent share of all videos viewed.
By emphasizing that the site is about providing entertainment on the computer, and not replacing television, the new social-networking features also could help ease concerns about Hulu’s potential to undermine the business interests of TV networks and cable operators.
Cable operators spend billions of dollars a year to media companies to carry their programs. However, many of these companies worry over the availability of free online video could eventually encourage people to cancel their cable subscriptions, hurting both cable operators and the companies that depend on their fees.
“Because Hulu has been so successful, they have now called into question the viability of the model going forward,” says James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research.
Hulu streamed almost 309 million videos last month, up 32% from January, according to Nielsen Online VideoCensus. Google Inc.’s YouTube is by far the leader in the online-video category, with nearly 5.2 billion streams last month.
The announcement coincided with the one-year anniversary of Hulu’s public debut. To mark the occasion, the NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture will introduce over the next week a “bevy of new shows, more seasons of user favorites, and classic cartoons and movies.”