Hulu

By Andrew Rachleff, Bethany Coates
2009 | Case No. E371
As Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, drove to his fledgling company’s board meeting in September 2007, he thought about what he wanted to accomplish. His plan for the three-month-old start-up, a video distribution website born out of a joint venture (JV) between NBC Universal (NBCU) and News Corporation, had diverged in a number of ways from the original vision of Hulu’s two media company parents. Before Kilar joined the company in July 2007, critics charged that NBCU and News Corp. would never be able to cooperate on the JV, and were destined to fail. Yet Kilar, who spent almost 10 years at Amazon.com, was convinced Hulu could be an enormous success under the right circumstances. He aimed to secure unanimous backing from the board for his agenda, even though some of his ideas would appear radical.
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