Tech Town, NC

TechCrunch reports that Hulu has acquired Beijing-based video sharing site Mojiti.com. Not much has been written about Mojiti, which, just for references’ sake, has an Alexa ranking of 108,289 at the moment, so this acquisition is a bit of a surprise/out of left field.

So why Mojiti? The selling point of Mojiti, as far as I can tell, is the ability to annotate any video with text in a sidebar or overlaid on the video, as well as nifty boxes and bubbles that can be added over video. All these notes and boxes are time-tagged as well, which is something we’ll probably be seeing in all video sharing sites soon.

The strange thing about Mojiti, however, is that they don’t host any video themselves. That’s right. You can’t upload a video to their site, you have to go through a 3rd party.

This is both bizarre, and makes a lot of sense. It’s bizarre in that they are completely dependent on, and potentially drive traffic to, competing video sites (which will likely add the notation features soon too). It makes a lot of sense, however, because Mojiti specializes in pulling video from a broad network of sites, and can work with all those formats. Keep in mind, the notation can be placed anywhere. Combine that with the fact that NBC-News Corp. see Hulu as the “world’s largest advertising platform” and you begin to see the strategy to place ads on a wide ranging network of their properties. The notation tools could be the channel through which all those ads are delivered.

Clearly, there is still a lot of work to be done to get this ready for prime time, but it’s nice to finally report on a step in the right direction for Lulu…I mean Hulu.