May 14 Hulu says HTML5 not up to the task
Much to the dismay of iPhone and iPad owners everywhere, Hulu has finally ended the rumor about a potential HTML5 version of their popular video streaming site. It seems to stem from a lack of support for DRM.
"We continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn't yet meet all of our customers' needs," said product vice president Eugene Wei.
"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. Not all video sites have these needs, but for our business these are all important and often contractual requirements."
Hulu recently announced a new player, but it's still based on Adobe's Flash technology. That leaves everyone with devices that that don't support flash, like iPhones, iPads and, for now at least, Android devices, without a Hulu solution.
The player does pack a bunch of new features like adaptive bitrate streaming. This is the ability to alter the quality of the show you're watching based on the how much bandwidth you have available, which should reduce how much buffering you have to wait for.
Audio and video experience should be improved as well. The new player has a resolution of 720 x 404px, roughly 25 percent better than the old player. There's also a volume normalization feature that should keep the volume levels consistent between the show you're watching and the ads.
The new seek preview feature shows a thumbnail of the video when you fast forward or rewind, making it easier to find what you're looking for.
"Since seeking past an ad break can trigger an advertisement before the video resumes playing, we wanted to do as much as possible to ensure our users get to the exact moment they’re searching for on the first try." says Wei.
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