Hulu brewing Flash-free iPad friendly site, says rumor
Is that the heady scent of unicorn tears or is it that my dreams are really coming to true? Here’s hoping Hulu really is putting together a Web site that doesn’t rely on Adobe’s buggy, endlessly crashing Flash plugin.
TechCrunch, a publication with a blushing relationship with the facts, writes that they’ve heard from an unnamed industry insider that Hulu is working on an iPad-friendly (i.e. Flash free) version of its site. This 21st Century, all-digital re-imagining of the legendary pairing of chocolate and peanut butter could be the killer application for Apple’s “latest creation.”
140 percent growth is impressive, but could obviously be better
Putting Hulu on the iPad boils down to a business decision, not a technical one. Getting Hulu to work on the iPad would not take as much work as some might expect. The biggest challenge to getting a large video library to play on the iPad (or iPhone) is to convert the underlying video files to the H.264 standard. Fortunately for Hulu, its videos are already encoded in H.264 and have been since the summer of 2008. So it doesn’t have to go back and re-encode all of its videos.
How Hulu goes about plugging H.264 video into those Web pages leaves the company with a number of choices: offloading content to QuickTime a la YouTube, rewriting their Web site in Javascript or perhaps using Jilion’s Flash and calorie-free SublimeVideo video wrapper.
They could follow the lead set by YouTube and Vimeo, which are displaying content in an HTML5 wrapper.
Thereupon, Hulu needs to choose the method that delivers their industry-leading user interface, which might just be doable using the increasingly popular and capable HTML5 standard.
So, what part of this story sounds unlikely or technically impossible? Well, if they’ve got a Web site that’s iPad-friendly, they’ve certainly made something that’s useable on the iPhone and Mac where there are perhaps 90 million and counting users that want something better — much better — than Flash. That seems like a pretty good business case for taking Hulu to the iPad + iPhone + Mac…
What’s your take?
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February 11th, 2010
Well, if hulu is able to use a standards based
approach to reach those 90 million users, it will
not only gain that audience share, but
light the way for the rest of the industry.
It’s amusing to see those with vested interest
in Flash speaking out both sides of their faces
with claims of their wide support and the who cares
about the 90 million users here , or the so many
million there downloading flash blockers to skip
advertising.
Adobe’s claims of the Internet going back to the
dark ages if proprietary software is not allowed
to reign is a waste of breath. They should be
focusing on how to leverage their authoring and
infrastructure tools like Flex to produce standards
based output.
It’s not death at the door, but rather opportunity.