Jason Kilar CEO of hulu.com Makes Me Nervous

Jason Kilar was on Charlie Rose the other night. He’s an interesting guy. He spoke with enthusiasm about hulu’s mission, hulu’s team of owner-employees, hulu’s positioning in the media business. He presents himself as a serious, smart leader. So why does he make me nervous?

During his conversation with Rose, Kilar mentions that hulu has three customers – their audience, their advertisers and their content creators. That breakdown bothers me for some reason. The “audience” is part of hulu’s business model – a silent partner of sorts. Isn’t the audience a separate entity? Kilar is suggesting that viewers are members and participants. He trumpets hulu’s ethos – success is achieved only when each customer group loves their product. They have to love it or they have failed. Love is the word.

Rent that e-Book!

MIT Press now lets you rent a book. Is this model a more “honest” approach to retailing e-books? Downloading a book on Kindle usually means that you’ve purchased that title. But the Amazon Cloud might part and decide to remove your treasured and annotated copy from your Kindle. Hmmmm. Would they actually come to my home and remove a book from my bedside table? I don’t think so.

It appears that I’m actually renting a book from Kindle, not buying it. But what if I want to save certain passages in the Kindle book or the MIT book rental? I’m beginning to imagine lines of people at copying machines with their e-book readers making hard copies of the pages they don’t want to lose. Will I need to purchase a pocket-size e-book reader copier?

Check out the story by Nazlah Salam or visit MIT Press.