Indie 2.0

[UPDATE, 12 Mar 08, 17:46 Hong Kong time: OK, so I'm not the first one to google hulu and figure out what a linguistic faux pas it was. On 29 Aug '07, Techcrunch pointed out the same Webster's entry I point out below. And a day later Zac Ecola eloquently skewered it in his blog. And there's a bunch of others.]

Lots of hype about Hulu (e.g., here, here and here, and from outside the U.S., here), but this is what you see when you click on a video and you don’t reside in the U.S. (As of noon 12 March Hong Kong time. The site is down now, prior to official launch. But this message is still what non-U.S. residents will see, even after “go live”.)

Hulu is the online video joint venture of News Corp. (NWS) and General Electric’s (GE) NBC Universal, which is supposed to “compete” with YouTube. What it really seems, so far: ham-fisted attempt by media giants to put Pandora back in the box. These guys

• want you to watch ads,
• don’t like democratized content creation (as they’re lunch gets eaten),
• stop fans of their content from spreading it around on YouTube,
• want all the profit (e.g., don’t want to share revenue with Apple by putting content on iTunes/Apple TV–a system that actually works and consumers like),
• don’t like a borderless world, because it cuts into the profit margins they’ve previously gained through ‘salami tactics’of charging for content to 200 different countries and territories around the world

Well, for the 95.5% of us (6.492 billion people, as of this month) that reside outside the U.S., the new Hulu brand leaves a bad taste in our mouths by treating us as second-class citizens. I hear the roar of a legion of 14-year olds, from Matamoros to Malacca, firing up their BitTorrent, after getting the message I got above…

And btw, which marketing genius thought up this name hulu and it’s implications around the globe? Wouldn’t you want to future-proof your brand, by making it appealing to all, in case you’re wildly successful and do go global? And what about cultural sensitivity (and simple self-preservation, pride and not wanting to appear foolish?) According to Websters online dictionary hulu in Chamorro means thunder. So you’re cool in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands (combined population of 230,000). But, again according to Websters, in Bahasa Indonesian and Malay hulu means butt, and in Hawaiian it means hair. So for vast swaths of the Pacific covering about a half billion people your proud new product, as a false cognate mashup, means… pubic butt hair.