Well excuse me if I’m not all super excited about Hulu’s attempt at moving to H.264. I live in Canada.. You know, America’s hat? Alright, who am I kidding I still use Hulu, and love it. Take that internet restrictions.
Alright, now for the quick bit of news. Apparently Hulu is scrambling to convert their video streaming service so that it serves up HTML5 compliant videos, instead of the flash ones that are present now. The news comes at an interesting time because Adobe’s evangelist used a Hulu screenshot in a post that illustrated that the iPad won’t be the best web experience. I said in my post about that fiasco that it’s only a matter of time until these websites start offering up alternative pages to devices that don’t support flash.
Lucky for Hulu they’ve apparently been keeping H.264 versions of video on file, so the migration to HTML5 might be a little bit quicker then originally expected by some pundits. Michael Arrington went on the record suggesting that the move to HTML5 might still be 3-5 years away (see video below), and that it’ll be a while before we could do away with Flash. Seems like the move might be a little more quicker than he thinks.
If Hulu is indeed working on an HTML5 player, and does have H.264 versions of their videos in storage, it’s likely only a matter of time before we see a native iPhone or iPad app. I’d welcome that to my video viewing setup, and I’m sure most users would as well.
Video of iPad discussion and HTML5
Via Techcrunch and TidBits
