Hulu has introduced an enhanced version of its online video player, and it's still written in Adobe Flash, because HTML5 isn't up to the job...
The Hulu website
Hulu, the US-only TV and movie site, has released a major update to its video player with features such as adaptive bitrate streaming, ad volume normalization, new closed caption display options and "seek preview", where hovering the mouse over the timeline provides a screen thumbnail.
Like most cross-platform video players, it has been developed in Adobe Flash, and the obvious competitor is Microsoft's Silverlight, not HTML. In a long blog post by Eugene Wei, Pardon Our Dust, Hulu points out that you just can't do all this stuff in HTML5. It says:
"When it comes to technology, our only guiding principle is to best serve the needs of all of our key customers: our viewers, our content partners who license programs to us, our advertisers, and each other. 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.
That's not to say these features won't be added to HTML5 in the future (or be easier to implement). Technology is a fast-moving space and we're constantly evaluating which tools will best allow us to fulfill our mission for as many of our customers as possible."
Of course, even if HTML5 had been developed to the point where it was usable, that would just present Hulu with a different set of problems. The biggest is that a lot of the browsers that are currently in use have limited or no HTML5 support. (Sure, users can upgrade: good luck with getting them to do that.)
Another major problem is the choice of a video codec, as discussed here previously. YouTube is using the H.264/AVC codec, which has become a video standard (it's needed for Blu-ray), but which is heavily patented. Not everyone can pay the huge sum needed for a license, and those who can afford it may be unwilling to pay as a matter of principle: Mozilla's Firefox can't show HTML5 videos for that reason. How many of the "Adobe can get stuffed" brigade realise that they're also saying "Mozilla can get stuffed", at least until a free and open codec is widely adopted. And unless it gets adopted by YouTube, that's pretty unlikely to happen.
Using Flash does mean that Hulu videos are not available on the iPhone and iPad, but Hulu could offer an app and charge for video that way -- indeed, Business Insider claimed one was imminent, more than a year ago. Certainly the lack of Flash makes vast amounts of web content inaccessible to iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users, which should make them ideal targets for a sales pitch.
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