Looking for Hulu? Too late.
Pros
Hulu was an exciting place to be in the 2010s. It originally entered the streaming media market in 2007 as an underdog, a strange joint venture sired by a group of reluctant parents from the broadcast media world (NBC, Fox, Disney, Warner). After some growing pains (FVOD) and a few missteps (Hulu Japan) it eventually found its stride in the mid-2010s with its SVOD service, though it still trailed significantly behind Netflix and Amazon, both in subscribers and clout. And then in 2017 in a span of just a few crazy months it launched a brand new app with a daring modern UX design, a live TV service which tried to push the industry forward by intentionally blurring lines between live and on-demand viewing, and released the Hulu Original "The Handmaid’s Tale" which caught everyone by surprise by capturing the zeitgeist of Trumpian America. By the end of the 2010s Hulu had grown to 30 million subscribers, became one of the leading virtual MVPDs in the U.S., and was getting ready to take on the international market. Disney took operational control of Hulu in May 2019. For Hulugans finally having a single parent after a decade of shared custody was initially welcome news as it brought some much needed vision and clarity to Hulu’s mission. Disney was publicly bullish and enthusiastic about Hulu’s future – so much so that they even announced that they’d be expanding Hulu internationally very soon. Teams at Hulu started prepping for the big international expansion project and Hulugans across the whole company were generally very optimistic about the future.
Cons
The mood at Hulu continued to be optimistic even when Hulu CEO Randy Freer announced his departure in January 2020. Disney publicly doubled down on their Hulu international expansion plans by announcing a 2021 launch date. Which is why it came as quite a shock to everyone, including most Hulu leadership, when during Disney’s quarterly earnings call in May 2020 Disney CEO Bob Chapek casually announced to the world (and Hulu) that they were putting Hulu’s global expansion on hold. No internal announcement of official project cancelation was ever sent out. More than 6 months of Hulu project planning went down the drain, and to add insult to injury Disney announced only several months later they were going to go international with their Star brand instead – and assigned the project to Disney Streaming Services, their division which built Disney Plus. From that point on the bad news started coming at Hulu fast and furious. In fall of 2020 Disney completed the integration of Hulu into their Media & Entertainment Distribution division, merging Hulu with Disney Streaming Services. Well, they called it a merger, but the vast majority of Hulu teams somehow ended up reporting to Disney Streaming Services managers. Surely just a coincidence. That fall most Hulu employee benefits were transitioned over to Disney’s plans, including medical & dental insurance and 401k. In nearly all cases the new Disney benefits were a significant step backwards. Health plan coverage costs skyrocketed due to across-the-board increases in premiums, deductibles, co-pays and out-of-pocket maximums. Disney tried to “ease the pain” of the transition by making one-time contributions to employees’ health savings accounts – but the contributions weren’t enough to even cover the cost difference of the first year, let alone future years. 401k matching decreased from 4% (immediately eligible, no vesting period) under Hulu to 2% (eligible after 1 year of service) under Disney. Disney tried to counter this setback with the introduction of retirement savings plans – but imposed a 3 year vesting period on the RSP contributions. Hulu salaried employees with less than 3 years of service saw their 401k matching effectively drop from 4% to 2% or less. Hulu’s long term cash incentives (LTIP) were replaced with Disney stock options, which would’ve been good news for the most part if Disney hadn’t also decided to offer the new long term incentives only to tech employees and executives. The rest of Hulu – over a thousand of amazing and talented people working in content operations, marketing, human resources, viewer experience, workplace experience, etc – they were deemed not important enough to warrant any long term rewards for their loyalty and hard work. In a span of a year over a dozen C-level execs and VPs left Hulu, including: CEO, CTO, SVP Ad Sales, SVP Talent & Organisation, SVP Engineering, SVP Content Partnerships, SVP Corp Comms, VP Content Acquisition, VP Platform Engineering, VP Information Security, VP Product, VP Product Design, VP Ad Engineering, VP Marketing, VP Brand & Culture Marketing – and I probably missed a few (did I mention already that Disney is terrible at internal communications?). Countless directors, managers and individual contributors also left the company in the past year. In fact, over 300 Hulu employees have left the company in the past 6 months alone. Hardly a week goes by anymore without at least one goodbye email landing in my inbox. In a year marked by a global pandemic which forced everyone at Hulu to work from home, Disney decided to boost Hulu employee morale by cancelling exciting global projects, rushing half-baked Disney consolidation projects instead, devaluing employee benefits, eliminating long term incentives for non-tech employees, mismanaging internal communications at every opportunity, breaking up Hulu tech and product organisations and moving them under DSS leadership. To say that Hulu employee morale is currently low would be a gross understatement. Hulu culture, which made Hulu the best and most exciting job I ever had in my career, is disappearing by the day.
