Hulu Says HTML5 Doesn't Yet Meet Their Needs [Update]

Hulu product head Eugene Wei says that HTML5 doesn't yet meet all of their customer's needs, according to a MediaMemo report. He made the following statement in a blog posting which has since disappeared.

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. Not all video sites have these needs, but for our business these are all important and often contractual requirements.

While this likely means an iPad compatible website is not coming soon, the rumored native Hulu application for iPad would not need to rely on HTML5.


*Update: You can find the cached version here. Hulu has also announced many new features such as:
- Adaptive Bitrate Streaming
- Ad Volume Normalization
- Closed Captioning Display
- Seek Preview
- Heat Map
- A Bigger, Sleeker Player
- Ad Tailor
- More Customization

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