Clown Co. Gets Website and New Name: Hulu

This morning news broke about NBC Universal and News Corporation’s joint video venture, hitherto dubbed “Clown Co.”, after a press release was sent out by a Hulu.com representative claiming that “Hulu” was the new name for that venture.

Initially, I was a bit concerned that this could be merely a hoax, as no press releases were sent out by NBC or News Corp. themselves. However, after speaking with the Hulu representative, Christina Lee, and seeing the news spread across the circuit like vine, it does appear as though this announcement is authentic.

The Hulu website, shown above, simply solicits email addresses for a private beta to be launched in October. There is also an open letter from CEO Jason Kilar explaining the choice of “hulu” as a name: “Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building.”

Jason goes on to explain that the private beta will initially involve only a small number of people but will grow with time. Distribution partner sites will include AOL, Comcast, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo.

With Hulu, NBC and News Corp. now have two placeholder video websites intended to eventually challenge YouTube, the other being Didja, a website for entertaining commercials.

Our previous coverage of Clown Co., er Hulu, can be found below:

* Wow - Clown Co. Got That $1 billion Valuation (still nameless though)
* Dear Clown Co.: Name This Thing Fast Before It’s Too Late
* News Corp, NBC May Announce Distributed YouTube Competitor Today; Google Scoffs

Thanks for the tip and help Jon Burg.

Update: Hulu is set to launch in the Fall around September and will focus on professional content and not take on YouTube directly as a viral video destination. The site remains solely an enterprise of the Fox/NBC joint venture, which raised over $100 million in financing from Providence Equity Partners. Videos will be played in their own embeddable branded player.

Some People Benefited From the Skype Outage

Alexa stats up to August 17 show a massive rise in traffic to Skype competitor Gizmo Project and a more modest rise for Grand Central at the peak of this weeks 36 hour Skype outage.

The SIPphone owned Gizmo Project offers a nearly identical package to Skype, but with added features including built in recording, and cross platform compatibility. Gizmo’s traffic tripled in the space of three days and rose to a rank of 8,561 in Alexa from a 3 month average of 19,102.

The Google owned Grand Central offers a one number everywhere telephone service. Whilst the service doesn’t compete with Skype in the softphone market, the service does provide functionality that competes with Skype services such as Skype In. According to Alexa, Grand Central hit a 4 week high on Friday with a 33% increase in rank over its 3 month average.

Skype Suffers Major Outage

Skype has suffered a major service outage that started from approximately 3am PST Thursday.

Skype advised that their engineering team had determined that the downtime was due to a software issue, with the problem expected to be solved “within 12 to 24 hours.”

The issue was serious enough to cause Skype to temporarily disable all downloads of the Skype client.

Skpe has had a very strong record of uptime previously and this outage is a first in recent memory. In comparison Twitter was down intermittently from 7pm PST Wednesday for around 6 hours, a fairy regular occurrence. Skype remained down at the time of writing as at 7:30am PST.