Why Hulu? 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. Our hope is that Hulu will embody our (admittedly ambitious) never-ending mission, which is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premier content when, where and how you want it.
I do like the name. As they said, it is short, fun, rhymes, and has no negative association in my mind to it. One issue it does have is the “radio test”, as some may hear it and remeber/type “Hooloo.com“, a domain name that has been registered since 1998.
I actually think the name is a cheesy name that some marketing “geniuses” finally just settled on. It doesn’t bring to mind media or video, it sounds like a name of a drunk clown. Its also sounds similar to “culo” which in spanish mean “butt”. It is short and rhythms but I think they could have done better. “YouTube” by comparison gives you instantly what it is and is very catchy.
Or listeners might hear Wholoo, or Wholew, or Hulew, or more likely Hula, since that is a Hawaiian dance that everyone has heard of, or Hello. We Americans can barely spell real words, so made up words have little chance unless they are plainly phonetic.
I don’t do typos, but if I did I’d be checking hooloo.com right now, and a few others.
Better to spend some money and acquire a real word. I know the made up word strategy worked for Yahoo and Google (though google is actually a mathematical term), but there are just too many of them now. (can you say Orkut, Kijiji, Jaja, Skype…) I’ve visited some of these sites multiple times and I still can’t remember how to spell them without looking them up!
A quick look few minutes ago at the availability of the hulu typos and hulu combinaisons of terms shows that already several hundred names were registered yesterday.
No doubt, the domainers community expect to take part of the hulu success.
Who said lately that the domainers community are not cybersquaters?
I’m not a regular reader of this blog, in fact this is my first time. But I thought you might find it interesting to know how I got here in the first place. I had heard about Hulu on NPR yesterday and made a mental note to look for it online when I got home, which I did by doing a Google search first for “hooloo” and then “wholoo”, which brought up this site as one of the top links. Radio test, indeed. Well, at least I was able to discover the correct spelling by reading your discussion! Okay, now on to Hulu.com.