The founding CEO pf Hulu Jason Kilar’s new company Vessel might be ready for launch as early as the end of the month, according to a report in Advertising Age.
The San Francisco-based company which is building a next generation video platform plans to compete head to head with YouTube.
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Vessel declares its mission to be to delight consumers and content creators alike. The company boasts that it has assembled a unique and talented team, with strong experience building and innovating at places like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon. This team says that it is unusually passionate about the intersection of media and technology and that it sees an opportunity to improve media, particularly next generation video.
It already began courting advertisers last month. “We have a lot of blue chip clients that want more super premium video that Vessel is promising to deliver, ” one ad buyer told the Wall Street Journal. The Journal also reported that Vessel is offering advertisers three different opportunities, including pre-roll ads that can run up to 30 seconds and full page ads that offer some form of animation or motion.
Vessel is asking about $30 to $50 CPMs (cost of reaching a thousand viewers) for online video ads. Advertisers will only pay for completed views of ads and only one ad is expected to appear per video. It hopes to sign up some early ad partners to ad packages that range from $250, 000 to $500, 000.
The company plans on signing content creators to long term exclusivity deals.
Vessel has so far raised $75 million in funding. Its investors are led by Benchmark, Greylock Partners, and Bezos Expeditions (the personal investment company of Jeff Bezoss.
Kilar left Hulu in March 2013 after serving as CEO of the Internet TV joint venture of Disney, NBCUniversal and 21st Century News since July 2007. Before joining Hulu he was the senior VP of worldwide application software at Amazon. He originally joined that company in May 1997 as a product manager.
