HTML5 vs Flash Wars: Hulu Chooses Adobe’s Flash for Its Player [Hulu Defies Apple & HTML5 As It Makes Important Updates to Its Player While Keeping Flash Support]

Tweet

You certainly must have noticed the HTML5 vs Flash wars that have been going on for a few months now. While Apple doesn’t even want to have any more thoughts on Flash, Adobe is really interested in countering Apple’s anti-Flash initiatives and promoting its product at all costs.

Some agree with Apple and some agree with Adobe, but neither one holds the truth when it comes to Flash facts and issues.

Hulu, the popular video streaming service, has decided to also take a stance on Flash today especially since the company decided to make some important upgrades to the whole Hulu environment and, most importantly, to the Hulu player. Unfortunately for iPhone, iPod and iPad owners, Hulu isn’t going to be more iPad friendly than it previously was since the company prefers Flash for now. In order to fully understand why Hulu doesn’t want to offer HTML5 support yet you’ll have to read though these official lines from the official Hulu blog:

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.

HTML5 might be coming in the future to Hulu, and it surely will, but now it’s a little too early for that.

But what will the new Hulu bring you? Here’s a list of new features for Hulu:

• Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (for a smoother viewing experience)
• Ad Volume Normalization
• Closed Captioning Display
• Seek Preview (in order to get faster to where you’ve left of watching a video)
• Heat Map (will help you see the most popular moments of a certain video)
• Bigger, “Sleeker” Player (25% larger player)
• Player Redesign
• New Player controls inside the player itself
• Various overall design tweaks and tricks
• Flash support
• New Ad Tailor advertising personalization
• Refresh of Hulu webpages
• Personalized Recommendations

Did you experience the new Hulu yet? In case you didn’t then you’d better switch from your Apple mobile device to a machine that comes with Flash on.