Hulu wants to enter China's online video market

The US online video provider Hulu unveiled its plan to enter China's market.

Hulu, second largest video provider on the web

Founded in March 2007, Hulu is a website offering commercial-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies from NBC, Fox, ABC, and many other networks and studios. 

The site focuses exclusively on professional content and does not take on YouTube directly as a viral video destination. It is currently the second largest video provider on the web. It also offers web syndication services for other websites including AOL, MSN, MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Comcast's fancast.com.

Hulu is a joint venture of NBC Universal (General Electric), Fox Entertainment Group (News Corp) and ABC Inc. (The Walt Disney Company), with funding by Providence Equity Partners, which made a US$100 million equity investment and received a 10% stake.

Hulu wants to go to China

In a speech at Tsinghua University in Beijing on June 5th, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar announced that Hulu 'plans to eventually launch services in China, and is currently considering allowing users to upload videos'. Hulu's videos are currently offered only to users in the United States.

Before entering China's market, Hulu will have to tackle with Chinese show and movie 'harmonization': any content that may be seen as controversial will have to be removed from the Chinese version.

The company has already established an R&D team in China after it acquired Bejing-based startup Mojiti in September 2007 and used its platform for the basis of the product.

China's online video market is today dominated by Tudou and Youku (let me remind you that Youtube is blocked in China) but Hulu might have an advantage since it will provide rich and original content.