Every so often, we pass the mic to a member of our Product Design team. What inspires them, what are they watching, a new band they love, a book they can’t put down — it’s all fair game. This month, we’re spotlighting proud plant parent & Marvel-fan, Theo Robinson. What is your role at Hulu? What do you work on? I am a Manager on the Viewer Growth team. My team experiments across the product with the aim of making it a simpler, more intuitive experience. We focus on the acquisition and retention of Hulu viewers through the Non-Subscriber Browse Experience, Product Marketing Landing P ..read more

By Samir Jafferali, Principal Systems Engineer DNS (Domain Name System) is one of the most critical services at Hulu. Back in 2015, we published a blog post about our DNS infrastructure, which I highly recommend reading if you haven’t already. Since then, our DNS infrastructure has changed significantly to meet the features and scale of our growing organization. How DNS Is Used at Hulu IP addresses provide the remote resource locations that computers need to access in order to resolve websites like hulu.com. DNS (Domain Name System) was created to translate hostnames into usable IP a ..read more

By Robert Dumoulin, Director, Data Science and Akhil Shah, Principal Data Science Lead What team helps Hulu make decisions about everything from content to marketing to new feature launches? The answer, if you haven’t already guessed it, is Data Science. Every team at Hulu gains crucial insights through DS. In our first in a series of blogs about the Data Science team (which is based in Hulu’s Santa Monica office), we’ll cover the team’s main functions, outline how we approach problems, and delve into some of our most exciting current projects. In future blog posts, we’ll go into mo ..read more

Every so often, we pass the mic to a member of our Product Design team. What inspires them, what are they watching, a new band they love, a book they can’t put down — it’s all fair game. This month, we’re spotlighting Senior Product Designer and ancient civilization aficionado, Renee Cao. What is your role at Hulu? What do you work on? I’m a senior product designer based in the Seattle office. I work on the Design System & Platform team, focusing on the Living Room space. In the 10 years I’ve been at Hulu, I’ve worked on many features across all platforms and devices. For t ..read more

By Billie Sue Chafins, VP, Software Development and Nick Brookins, VP, Software Development This July, Hulu’s U.S.-based tech team held its seventh annual — and first completely virtual — Hackathon. For 10 days, teams collaborated remotely to develop projects designed to better serve Hulu’s viewers, solve complex technological problems, and explore exciting new product possibilities. Despite teams being entirely remote, a record number of Hulu employees and interns participated in the Hackathon this year. Interns who’d never interacted in person teamed up across states and time zones to creat ..read more

Designing for the Living Room by Dru Sidle, Principal Product Designer You finish working a long day and you badly need a break, a respite from balancing several projects all with end-of-the-week deadlines. You could go for a jog or clean up around your place, but neither would give you the pause for your mind to recover. So you settle into your couch (by yourself or with a loved one), pick up the remote, and start watching your favorite tv show or movie. Ahhhhhhhhh… you can finally relax. You even notice that your headspace feels lighter. What you aren’t likely noticing i ..read more

Hello! Welcome to Hulu Product Design. Who we are We’re a group of designers, researchers, writers, and more who work on how people experience Hulu. We strive to bring that vision to life in a way that feels inspired, refined, and even magical. Above all, we aim to create meaningful relationships that bring people closer to their favorite content. What you’ll find here We want to give you regular peeks into how we design for the entertainment space and the unique challenges that we face. We want to connect, inform, and inspire through content written by designers, writers ..read more

By Sean Barag, Senior Software Developer For fans of: programming languages, javascript, typescript, coffeescript It’s been a while since we’ve talked about our Living Room application on this blog, but that’s because big things have been happening! Last year, Kirk Yoder described how a unified runtime allows Hulu to deploy a single codebase across multiple clients. That’s still very much the case, so let’s spend some time a little bit further up the stack, in the JavaScript source itself. The short version: For living room devices not including Roku or Apple TV, Hulu used to be written in Cof ..read more

Keep Calm and Hack on — Hulu Beijing Hackathon By Han Nie, Associate Technical Program Manager At the 2019 Hulu Beijing Hackathon, 140 Hulugans tinkered away for more than 30 hours on 27 innovative projects. During this event, we were showered with various intriguing ideas, ranging from an auto-piloted aircraft to an app that automatically takes selfies. Smart Video Ads by AI Powered by state-of-the-art deep learning models, this project automatically integrates advertisement into specific area of the background (Wall, TV set, etc), incurring little disruption for viewer experience. Xile.me (H ..read more

by Joe Bentley, SVP of Engineering and Rafael Soltanovich, VP of Software Development This summer, Hulu’s tech team held its annual Hackathon in Santa Monica and Seattle. More than 100 Hulugans and interns spent 48 hours designing and coding 40 projects that pushed creative and technical boundaries. In the spirit of the Hackathon, teams worked tirelessly on features that aimed to improve Hulu viewers’ experiences and Hulu employees’ lives, including an enhanced navigation tool for Hulu HQ’s growing campus, a feature that allows co-watching on Hulu, and an eye-controlled remote. Though not all ..read more