14 DAY TRIAL // Hulu, the popular video-streaming service, is set to concentrate on a dedicated iPad app, not an optimized website, to deliver video to Apple iPad users, reports say. Hulu reportedly posted an article on its official blog on Thursday, in which the company’s Vice President of Product stated that Hulu was not embracing HTML5 in the immediate future. The company then quickly retracted its statement, with no explanation whatsoever.
According to a report issued yesterday by AppleInsider, Eugene Wei, Hulu vice president of product, said that Hulu had some contractual requirements that made the transition to HTML5 quite difficult. He said that Hulu’s Flash-based player was more about streaming video, citing security, reporting, rendering content through top-notch codecs, fast communication with the Hulu servers, and more.
Wei’s actual words reportedly were, "We continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn’t yet meet all of our customers' needs," he wrote. "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."
AppleInsider explains that various sources managed to grab Wei's retracted comments and share them online before the company pulled the blog post in question. It adds that such a statement, if true, would calm spirits down in regards to rumors that Hulu was converting to HTML-5 to provide an iPad-friendly site. This still doesn’t mean iPad users will not get a specialized Hulu application, such as the ABC Player, in the future, the site adds. In fact, it is believed that Hulu will, one day, bring its services to the iPad through a pay-only service that would include a free app, and a monthly subscription.