-->
Save your FREE seat for Streaming Media Connect this August. Register Now!

SME '17: Hulu Explains Challenges of Merging Live TV and SVOD

During its newfront presentation two weeks ago, Hulu unveiled its long-awaited live service, which offers subscribers over 50 live channels and the company's on-demand library for $40 per month. On the surface, it looked like a simple blending of VOD and live services. Under the hood, though, it was anything but simple.

In a standing-room only opening day keynote at Streaming Media East 2017, Tian Lim, Hulu's chief technology officer, showed how his team was able to blend live and SVOD. It wasn't always easy, and the technologies behind it were far from perfect.

"We really believe we have an opportunity to redefine television again," Lim said, noting that Hulu wasn't simply trying to recreate the broadcast experience but create something new. This is TV built around the viewer, he said. The user interface (UI) does away with the standard electronic program guide (EPG) and instead relies on viewer personalization and discovery. Most TV services look the same because they have a UI that's been slapped on top of content rights requirements. Hulu wanted to offer something more elegant. Content comes with a variety of different rights issues, but Lim's team wanted to insulate the viewers from that.

In creating a live service, Hulu faced its own unique obstacles. It has millions of subscribers and uses its own custom content management system. It also uses a custom ad server, custom players, and custom reporting. If that wasn't enough, it deviates from standard metadata.

Metadata integration was a big part of Lim's keynote, and he called it an extremely painful process. Hulu gets content from a large variety of sources, each of which has metadata idiosyncrasies that needed to be resolved.

The SCTE 35 ad insertion standard works for broadcast, Lim said, but isn't robust enough for automated systems. In fact, last week Hulu disabled SCTE 35 on some channels because "it was just too broken," Lim said. One provider, for example, only provided ad starts. The standard needs to be more heavily adopted and made more robust for OTT delivery. As is, it's impossible for Hulu to use it to use it with its ad avails system.

Lim said the industry needs richer metadata and a common ID space for all kinds of content. The need for richer metadata art is a special problem for Hulu, which relies on visuals to entice viewers. Some programs had no art and some lacked portrait art. Hulu needed to create its own application to create art for sports matchups. Lim wants the industry to take art more seriously so companies can perform A/B testing and optimize art on a per-user basis.

Lim also wants to see more flexibility in ad breaks, offering variations from standard broadcast ad pods. "We all know that too many ads, it just sucks," he said. What's needed is experimentation that can create more engaged viewers, higher CPM rates, and reduced ad loads.

For its live service, Hulu put all content ingest, repackaging, DVR controls, and origin serving in the cloud. While that freed Hulu from having to create a data center and build bandwidth, leading to a faster time to market, the company needed to learn a lot about creating a large deployment with Amazon Web Services.

While the backend is complicated and going early has its challenges, creating a simple and effective user interface was the primary goal.

"We love TV, movies, and sports, and I hope it comes through when you browse our UI," Lim said.

Streaming Covers
Free
for qualified subscribers
Subscribe Now Current Issue Past Issues
Related Articles

Hulu Notes How Television Has Changed: Report From DMEXCO '17

Not long ago, programmers told viewers when their favorite shows would air and when they needed to watch. Now, viewers hold the power—while programmers and marketers need to keep up.

Video: How to Engage Users and Merchandise Your Content

Hulu CTO Tian Lim discusses the challenges of monetizing and merchandising content while working within the restrictions of current content licensing parameters and not inserting too many ads.

Video: How Hulu Blurred the Lines Between Live, DVR, and VOD

Hulu CTO Tian Lim and Streaming Media's Tim Siglin discuss how Lim's team brought live streaming to Hulu and the technical and business challenges they faced in this interview from Streaming Media East 2017.