Reaction to the name of NBCU and News Corp’s new video portal has been almost entirely negative, and I’m afraid I have to agree. I mean, “hulu?” For the uneducated, the two media giants announced the partnership before they’d hired anybody or had a name for it, so media bloggers and observers dubbed it “ClownCo,” which would’ve been a better name than hulu, for crying out loud.

This portal has been so hyped as God’s gift to online video that any name they came up with would likely have bombed, especially with the tech community — which includes the people who’ve written the book on online video without the “help” of the networks or studios. Old media just doesn’t get that new media isn’t created in a board room with fancy consultants (oh shit, I’m a consultant!), because the results are usually just varnished horse crap. Hulu? The first thing people did was research the word in various languages, and the meanings are almost too funny to believe. In Indonesian, it means “butt.” In Swahili, “cease and desist.”

The problem is that the fuss over the stupid name casts a pall on what is really a smart move by NBC and Fox, namely creating a single portal for video instead of asking people to come to each branded site. Of course, it would be better if all networks were a part of this, and I think announcing the project without a name or a more complete partner list was a huge tactical error.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 9:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Disruptions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.