Eighteen months after leaving his CEO post at Hulu, Jason Kilar on Tuesday announced a name for his anticipated new content startup, Vessel, as well as some powerful backing.
Posting on Vessel.com, Kilar referenced lead investors including Benchmark, Greylock Partners and Bezos Expeditions, which is headed by his former boss, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) founder and chief Jeff Bezos.
"We have assembled a unique and talented team, with strong experience building and innovating at places like Hulu, Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) and Amazon," Kilar writes. "As a team, we are unusually passionate about the intersection of media and technology; we see an opportunity to improve media, particularly next generation video."
So is Kilar's new venture a video-on-demand play meant to compete with Hulu, Netflix and Amazon, as well as the pay TV industry?
As Re/code reported, Kilar had been in previous months taking meetings with institutional publishers like Conde Nast, The New York Times and News Corp. He's also been talking to Hollywood studios about video content.
Citing anonymous sources, Re/code also says Kilar has secured around $75 million in backing so far.
For more:
- read this Vessel post
- read this Re/code story
Related links:
Hulu hires Fox's Mike Hopkins as new CEO
Hulu chief Kilar and CTO resigning
Hulu announces Apple redesign, appoints acting CEO