Rumor: Hulu looking to make their videos iPad compatible

Wed, Feb 10, 2010

News, Rumors

There’s no getting around the fact that Apple doesn’t like Flash, won’t support it on its mobile products, and never will. There’s also no getting around the fact that for as much as people seem to be ragging on Flash these days, a lot of popular content on the web is Flash only, with the most obvious example being Hulu, the online video site that continues to see astronomical growth month after month.

With the iPad launch now less than 2 months away, TechCrunch reports, citing an “industry insider”, that Hulu may very well be working to make all of their content accessible on the iPad by the time the device hits store shelves in March. Notably, such a move wouldn’t be littered with technical hurdles as all of Hulu’s videos are already encoded in the iPad friendly H.264 format and would therefore not require Hulu to re-encode all of its content.

Getting Hulu’s videos to play on the iPad is not that big a deal. They could just do what YouTube does and pop open the Quicktime player when a viewer tries to click on a video in their browser. But making people switch applications every time they want to watch a video isn’t the best experience. Hulu could rectify that in two ways: build a custom iPad/iPhone app with its own player, or rewrite its site in Javascript for the iPad/iPhone browser.

A dedicated Hulu app?! Now we’re talking, and though it may never come to fruition, it seems abundantly clear that a Hulu app on the iTunes App Store would not only skyrocket to the top of charts, but would be so enticing that users would be more than willing to pay $1.99 for it.

Make it happen, people.

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