When NBC Universal and News Corp announced they were building a joint video site, somebody nicknamed it Clown Co., and the name stuck hard enough that the company has had to publicly live it down for most of the last year. Two historic rivals, in an industry not known for cooperating with itself, launching a streaming service together sounded like a punchline, and for a while it was treated as one.
The site has been running as an invite-only beta since October, and after spending some time inside it, I don’t think the joke holds up anymore.
What makes it different from everything else calling itself online video is that this is licensed, ad-supported, official network content, not a clip somebody uploaded from a camcorder pointed at a television. Full episodes, reasonable quality, playing inside a browser with no download required. That combination barely existed before this, because getting two networks that compete for the same advertisers to agree on a shared platform, a shared ad model, and a shared answer to how revenue gets split is a negotiation that kills most attempts at exactly this idea before they launch.
The obvious comparison is YouTube, and it mostly favors Hulu on what television actually needs: content nobody has to sneak past a rights holder. A clip on YouTube is one takedown notice away from vanishing. An episode on Hulu is there because the people who made it agreed it should be, which means an advertiser can commit money to it without wondering whether the whole thing disappears next week.
The interface still needs work, and the catalog is thinner than a full season on either network’s own site, but the core idea, that the networks would rather build the platform themselves than watch users find one anyway, seems to be working.
I do not think this settles the argument about whether television moves online. What it settles is a narrower question: whether the companies that actually own the content would ever cooperate on distribution instead of competing to control it separately. A year ago, the answer looked like no. Right now it looks closer to yes, and it took the industry laughing at its own joint venture to get there.