Hulu CEO to Users, “We Screwed Up Royally…”

On January 9th, video content provider Hulu removed several seasons of the popular F/X series, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia“ from their website with no advance warning. Despite Hulu’s general stance on taking down content (they would prefer not to do it), such moves are sometimes necessary to comply with the networks who own the original rights. A set of circumstances that leaves Hulu precariously positioned between their networks and customers, having to delicately balance both unique relationships in order to make their site successful. And while the above situation may be nothing new, the repercussions following this particular instance are noteworthy, given the audience reaction to the sudden removal and how Hulu handled the fallout.    

Had Hulu simply told their customers that the show was going to becoming down before it was removed, the whole situation might have been avoided, but instead users found out for themselves and responded en masse to voice their disproval.  Realizing their colossal mistake, Hulu quickly moved to temporarily restore the content – with F/X’s okay – until January 25th and CEO Jason Kilar issued a public apology on the website in language that was decidedly un-corporate and sincere. Measures that perfectly illustrate the evolving relationship between companies and consumers and the effectiveness of social networking in closing the feedback loop. An excerpt of his letter follows below:

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.