No HTML5 Hulu Anytime Soon

99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes "The Hulu website briefly commented the other day about why they would not be implementing HTML5 video for their service: 'We continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn't yet meet all of our customers' needs. Our player doesn't just simply stream video, it must also secure the content, handle reporting for our advertisers, render the video using a high performance codec to ensure premium visual quality, communicate back with the server to determine how long to buffer and what bitrate to stream, and dozens of other things that aren't necessarily visible to the end user.' They plan to release a dedicated application for the iPad and iPhone instead, likely a paid subscription service. Perhaps this is a good sign for Web-based television, as it will move more users away from the single, locked down channel from the networks and to more diverse options less interested in extracting subscription fees (like YouTube)."

Comments

Re:Performance is another issue

[evilviper]

While people love to hate on Flash, it actually performs quite will for video on most systems. It can chat with the video card and use it to accelerate decoding.

Flash is a horrible dog. It's only VERY, VERY recently started performing well on Windows, because they gave up decoding video, and handed it off to the OS, which can accelerate it via the videocard. For fuck's sake, Flash didn't even do the most basic hardware overlay until maybe a year ago, available in the mid 90s on damn near every video card, and standalone video player.

And while Flash may have gotten lucky on Windows, no such luck on other platforms. Flash on Linux is as big of a dog now as it ever was. Jumpy, flickery, tearing mess. And don't claim they can't do better, VADPU support on Linux has been in MPlayer for many months. Besides, I shouldn't need hardware acceleration just so stupid 480kbps 400x300 Hulu videos don't bring my 2GHz+ CPU to a grinding halt...