• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, September 13, 2007

As the industry awaits the launch of Hulu, rumors swirled Wednesday that News Corp. and NBC have acquired a Beijing-based startup named Mojiti to help their much-hyped video venture take off.

The unconfirmed news, first reported by industry blog TechCrunch, comes just weeks after Hulu CEO Jason Kilar said the site would miss its previously announced late-summer release date.

Still, Mojiti is merely a provider of video personalization and annotation technology, and so is unlikely to factor too heavily into Hulu's larger back-end technology platform, according to Gartner Research analyst Andrew Frank.

"It doesn't look like Mojiti would provide a core piece of the technology as much as an added annotation feature," said Frank. In other words, he added, news of the acquisition does not imply that Hulu is struggling to get off the ground, nor would an even later launch date necessarily bode poorly for the joint venture.

"In the game of expectations management, they may be faulted for taking too long," said Frank, "but the quality of the service is going to be much more important than any arbitrary launch date."

The selling price for Mojiti was in the $10 million range, according to TechCrunch, citing sources close to the deal. Hulu spokeswoman Christina Lee declined to comment on what she termed "rumors." Mojiti did not respond to email requests for comment.

Compared to many other Web-focused technology startups, Mojiti has received little press coverage until now. The company was founded in May 2006 by Eric Feng--a one-time employee at Microsoft Research Asia.

There is clearly a great deal riding on the success of Hulu. Last month, Providence Equity Partners, a media investment firm based in Rhode Island, invested $100 million for a 10% stake in the video venture. The investment was expected to both hasten the rollout of the site, and ease the financial burden it is placing on both JV partners.

The two partners announced their plans for the then-unnamed venture in March, claiming then that their combined network would reach a full 96% of all Web surfers nationwide.

Hulu is supposed to offer full episodes from NBC's "30 Rock" and Fox's "Prison Break," along with films from each parent company's libraries and series from various cable networks under the NBCU and News Corp. umbrellas.