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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)."
Besides the fact that HTML5 isn't really finished yet nor implemented in the most used browsers (and not fully in others), they mentioned where HTML5 video fails too, like securing the content. Now slashdot crowd probably says this is a good thing, but theres not much to do if TV networks require it. Another case in point is determining how long to buffer and what bitrate to use (change dynamically). Does HTML5 video offer these options?
that flash sucks and HTML5 is bestest way to stream video
It's probably more along the lines that Hulu isn't interested in rushing out an HTML5 app that will cost X to develop while their current client works perfectly well for the majority of their customers.
Rather than retooling their website it is more logical to do what they are actually doing and code a standalone app that will probably get rejected from the app store.
Yes, if a corporation dares to choose a widely-used product with a large install base, which fits their use requirements, as opposed to a relatively new, only moderate install base with different features available (no Firefox/Opera with H.264, no Safari/iPhone with Theora, no Internet Explorer period), which does not fit their use requirements on even one browser, then they must be 'in cahoots' with the company who makes that product.
I know you were going for a better-than-average first post without too much thought, but really, stop listening to Apple. Adobe is not a conspiracy.
Honesty in this case - admitting that "our customers" (plus their needs) and their users aren't the same thing...
One that hath name thou can not otter
This is not a surprise, I work with online video professionally and html5 is not yet a serious option.
RealPlayer, Windows Media Player and Flash are the only players that have the suite of features that are required to stream live and on-demand video properly.
I am looking forward to the day when html5 is ready but it looks like it is a long way off.
The "Flash is dead!" people have no idea what they're talking about.
I mean just look at the API for windows media player or realplayer and then go look at html5... they're not in the same league.
it must also secure the content
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason it won't happen. HTML5 is just too open for them. With Flash there are still various tricks to secure the stream (I believe the BBC iPlayer used to XOR it or something like that...)
for flash there is a huge development environment with all kinds of knowledge on the internet to make it faster and cheaper. other than the fact that HTML5 isn't even a standard yet how do the dev tools compare? no one wants to code the website in assembly
Are you referring to Hulu or the HTML5 spec writers.
As Apple is in perfect shape now, I would be questioning "Why on earth our own Quicktime, even with DRM since V5 not even considered as an option?"
Someone should really start asking these questions now, that great framework is really being wasted. They didn't even bother to ship Quicktime X for Windows. Before attacking other companies frameworks/players/plugins, he should check the shape and missed opportunities of Quicktime department in Apple.
It's probably more along the lines that Hulu isn't interested in rushing out an HTML5 app that will cost X to develop while their current client works perfectly well for the majority of their customers.
This is probably true. It will be more cost effective in the short term, but you're missing the big motivation. Hulu does not want to provide open video. They want to provide subscription services, which they're moving to on the Web right now for a portion of content. They can make more money by only providing content to Apple devices that pay a subscription fee via an app, especially since those users won't be able to just use a Web browser for some content. Remember, Hulu is run by the networks.
Rather than retooling their website it is more logical to do what they are actually doing and code a standalone app that will probably get rejected from the app store.
Why would it get rejected from the app store? It will be trivial to provide the same content in different containers in a simple Web app using almost completely code provided in Apple's toolkits. Netflix has done it and they use Silverlight on the Web. Your assertion that it will probably be rejected is just your bias showing.
I was having this conversation just yesterday. ABC was able to release a IPad app that played the same video they have on Hulu.. the Advertising looks the same.. it looks like they just made hulu play a different format for the IPad. This also brings up a point, why has Adobe not made a player for flash like Apple did with YouTube? it may launch the video in its own player. This would not help for Flash games or it may work the same.. I don't know I do know that Adobe would get more support from me if they created a real app and was denied than just crying about how Apple did not let them. and for Hulu, they have proven to me that they are not really interested in going outside of what they already offer, so its no real surprise that they have not made an app or worked on making the site more compatible with other devices. for me it matters little as Comcast is either filtering and giving less bandwidth to Hulu to make everything I watch pause 3 or 4 times during a show, and Verizon DSL.. Forget it .. not worth the bother
if its not the internet than I would go with Hulu can not keep up with streaming video.. but people on FIOS do not have the same issues. so I am sticking with its the fault of the internet provider.
I am of the opinion, That content providers talk about streaming media, but still do not see the market.
This proves once again that when the customers are advertisers the best solution is Flash. It will be some time before another technology becomes this ad friendly. As the article notes, HTML is great at delivering content, but not DRM or advertising.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
HTML5 could do the things they want, it would just not be very processor efficient
Hulu's new flash player that launched yesterday is also not processor efficient. Two days ago Hulu videos played at a reasonable frame rate on my old Mac laptop. Today it's impossible to watch. If it were in HTML5 it would run perfectly.
Developers: We can use your help.
Except that are doing more work (both upfront and in maintenance) in the form of a dedicated iPhone/iPad application. So I'm inclined to believe them.
Lets say HTML5 becomes the perfect tool to a point that even Adobe starts to depreciate their own stuff for it... What will be done about the needs of professional content creators? DRM? Anti-rip? Today's media logic says "There has to be some sort of inconvenience and responsibility creating thing in a media framework". For example, everyone knows DVD CSS is dead,easily cracked but it is still implemented on movies especially to create a situation that user has to run "illegal software" to rip the commercial DVD.
How do you implement DRM "openly"? Remember Real Networks CEO suggested Linux/BSD guys should really think about a DRM standard and everyone (rightfully) laughed at him? HTML5 now has the same issue, globally.
That's not the right kind of "variable bit rate". The kind of VBR you're describing is merely varying the bit rate within a stream for compression efficiency. Hulu dynamically switches between streams at different bit rates, depending on the speed of your connection.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Go to archive.org, find a video you'd like to see, copy the link address for the file, then open that in mplayer. Works with absolutely no drama for me, whether I choose avi, mpg, ogv, etc. IOW, Hulu's explanation is mostly bullshit. They have exactly one reason, and that is "securing the content" -- which is pretty much nonsense. It isn't like your average "consumer" bothers with unauthorized copying/downloading. The hysteria on the "piracy" issue is completely absurd.
Caveat Utilitor
What 'single locked down channel' are we discussing here? There is presently more than Hulu alive on the web now, is there not?
Hulu is a joint venture of Fox, NBC, and ABC (now pulling out). The idea was they could maintain a singe front for providing mainstream TV, even as users moved way from cable and towards the internet for entertainment video. They were scared by YouTube and the like and wanted to make sure they could be the gatekeepers controlling the content as a cartel (like the RIAA has done with radio). That way they could extract more money in subscription fees going forward and at the same time reduce the threat of independent TV programming from being a more democratized source of content. Fox (for example) doesn't want to have to sell programs to users. They want to be able to sell subscriptions to all their content at once and so get paid just as much by people who think 90% of their content is crap.
Please do clarify, dear submitter.
Does that clarify my somewhat vague submission? I sort of assumed Slashdotters knew the history behind Hulu and the network's strategy with it.
"and you could always write a better one."
Please show me a link to an RTMPE specification.
Reverse engineered ones are not allowed.
"Adobe's player is not great, but it works"
Depends on how you define "working". I define "working" as "can play H.264 video with at most a 50% CPU resource penalty compared to other implementations".
By this definition, it isn't working - a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom has no problem playing Hulu-resolution H.264 video smoothly. (Actually, thanks to rtmpdump, I have tested actual Hulu content), while a 2 GHz Athlon XP slideshows, and an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 + Nvidia 8800GT still has visible framerate stuttering on a regular basis.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
You don't understand. By variable bitrate, they mean changing the bitrate on a per-viewer basis. So, if someone has a particularly bad connection, it gives them a lower quality picture so that they can keep up. And if they're connection improves (they turn off their torrents, for example) then the bitrate they are being provided would improve.
As far as I know, the object in HTML5 does not allow swapping out the referenced video while it's playing with another one encoded at a different bitrate. Silverlight does this for you with its streaming engine, with Flash it's at least possible to synchronize all the components, but it's rarely done. (You need to synchronize audio and video to a high degree of precision to avoid the user noticing.)
This is a valid complaint, and actually one of Microsoft's major selling points on Silverlight, and it's why Netflix adopted it for their online viewer. The variable bitrate per viewer playback that adjusts itself according to your connection is extremely important to providing at least a basic experience. Netflix's implementation is a little bad (it does pause the video if your connection quality goes down, but there are other Silverlight players that do it seamlessly.)
The HTML5 spec authors would do well to read that hulu blog. If they really want HTML5 to win, they need to provide the support necessary so sites like hulu can do what they want to do.
Really hulu has made it very easy for them, giving them an explicit goal to shoot for.
HTML5 advocates should really give an option for content security aka DRM, that is how real World works for now...
Even if they wanted to, how would you propose that they do that? It would be trivial enough to add a "donotallowworthlesspirateusertocopyonpainofdeath" option to the video tag; but that would only be as useful as the various browser's enforcement of it. You might get some vendors on board(though that would hardly be a given. The FOSS guys hate DRM on principle, and the corporates already have their own DRM systems, and it isn't clear that they want the competition); but you would have absolutely no way to go after the ones that refused, or the fly-by-night redistribution of copies of firefox compiled with the -ignore_DRM_flags option set.
If you observe real world DRM systems, they are all either single-party(WMDRM, Fairplay, etc.) or multi-vendor standards controlled by IP cartels bristling with patents that you must license in order to implement whatever the attached spec is(CSS, HDCP, AACS). HTML5 is in neither position. There would be absolutely no way to stop the proliferation of implementations compliant enough to receive the video; but noncompliant with respect to denying it to the user(good luck, for instance, having your site distinguish between a good-faith/best-effort DRM implementing webkit build, and a slightly tweaked build that reports exactly the same ID strings but "accidentally" lets the precious premium content sit in a snoopable memory location...
On closed platforms, where undesired binaries can simply be excluded, it'd be trivial enough; but there would be Just No Way on PCs generally.
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. This is important for HD content because you start to discover that HD can hit even a modern dual core hard if there's no acceleration. Well Flash accelerates nicely on Windows, and is supposed to be getting the ability to do so on the Mac (not sure on the status, I don't have a Mac).
Now I'm sure HTML5 can have this done, but it has to be done in the browsers people use before it would be a real contender. Saying "Well it could in theory accelerate video," does you fuck-all good if the web browsers out there don't do it. The net effect would be people would find HTML5 video choppy and it would bog their system down whereas Flash wouldn't. They wouldn't care about the reasons, they'd just say "This sucks."
For that matter, all the dynamic HTML5 type stuff itself may need new browser architectures. An interesting test to look at it Microsoft's IE9 platform preview (http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/). They've got a whole bunch of different demos of various types. Now the interesting thing is to look at them in Firefox, and in the IE9 preview. IE9 kills it speed wise, and function wise. Most things run twice as fast or more, and things like text scaling is smooth and fluid as you'd see in Flash, not jumpy.
So to truly have a good HTML5 experience, we may need a new generation of browser that makes good use of the video card to accelerate everything. As far as I know, there's nothing that does that right now, since IE9 is just a preview (and not really usable as a general web browser) and none of the rest are doing it. We may have to wait awhile before browsers can perform up to the level people would want with HTML5.
You could just post a link to the mp4 stream, lots of players handle that just fine.
Youtube doesn't stream video and they don't provide live feeds either. I'm sure progressive downloads can be done just as well in HTML5 as they can be done in flash, but that's totally different from what Hulu does.
wait, HTML5 supports a DRM-enabled video codec?
you're not going to see premium content (ie movies, TV) on the web without it.
i used to do web video hosting for a major movie studio. their web distribution policy explicitly required all their content to be protected with DRM wherever it's shown on the web (iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, wherever).
a DRM-free web is a (movie|tv)-free web. at least for now.
Thanks for the reply. It is as I assumed, then. You're making a huge generalization
There is an attempt, somewhat stalled, to use Hulu to control Web TV to a large extend by consolidating the efforts of the major networks and allowing them to (probably illegally) collude on mainstream TV's display on the Web. That's not really a generalization as a rather ubiquitous analysis of the market by many many different news and industry groups.
ave left out at least one major television network, if not several, in your 'single' descriptor.
Hulu failed to get buy in from CBS because CBS had already launched a competitor and was getting better advertising revenue than they wanted to offer. The others hoped the success of Hulu would pressure CBS to get on board, but it has failed so far and with ABC bailing out the venture might be a lost cause (Note that Steve Jobs sits on the board and is the biggest shareholder of Disney which owns ABC). That covers all of the "big four" of broadcast TV. There are smaller players, of course, many of which Hulu had signed on but which are not really very important in terms of the industry, which is remarkably consolidated right now.
Broadcast TV is essentially dead, outside of local news and programming.
Largely true, but this does not lessen the power of four companies that control anywhere from 35-70% of TV viewership collectively. The big networks on Cable are also the big networks for Web viewing.
The description you're offering could be applied to any online business venture. Netflix is 'conspiring' to be the 'only' online movie rental outfit, too.
You don't seem to understand the meaning of the word "conspiring" which you misuse, or the word "collusion" which I use. You don't conspire or collude with yourself. It's prefectly legal for Netflix to compete with Blockbuster in the market and attempt to gain control of the market. It's illegal for Netflix to collude with Blockbuster to jointly control the market for mail order DVD rentals and profit more than they would in a competitive market. The same goes for the RIAA which is a cartel convicted of jointly negotiating prices (also known as price fixing). The same laws apply to joint ventures of TV show producers like the big four collectively bargaining with advertisers for the Web.
They use RTMP streaming, I believe. There are utilities which can capture it, but they continually vary their implementation. There have been DMCA takedown notices sent to rtmpdump, but perhaps not by them in particular : http://linuxcentre.net/rtmpdump-can-be-used-to-download-copyrighted-works-like-a-web-browser
"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
I'm curious why people keep repeating this, presenting it as some sort of insightful comment, and also implying that us viewers are somehow being wronged or tricked by it.
Internet TV is no different from regular TV in that there's really only two established ways to make money with it. Either you go the HBO route and make people subscribe in order to view content, or you show the content for free and try to convince people to pay you for advertisements.
There's nothing new about this, and there's nothing sneaky about it. TV has worked this way for decades, and while the internet has changed many things about the world, it's not going to change the fact that people aren't going to make shows unless they can get paid for it. And in order to get paid for it, someone is going to have to cough up money. Television will slowly continue to make the transition to internet based delivery, eventually we'll be able to watch any show whenever we want, eventually we'll be able to view it all on our little digital watches on the subway or whatever. But what will never change is the fact that someone's going to have to pay for it, and lots of people would rather have the advertisers do the paying.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.