Hulu.com: More on HTML5 v. Flash

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.

In February, I offered four reasons why you shouldn’t count Flash out just yet. Eugene Wei Hulu.com‘s Vice President of Product offers four more in his post Pardon Our Dust about Hulu’s new video player (Via New TeeVee).

Thank you Mr. Wei for writing a follow-up post for me. HTML5 is great way to deliver audio and video to the browser in a way that frees users from having to install a plug-in. What it isn’t so great for — yet — are the things that many content creators and advertisers find important: tracking, DRM and ad serving.

Here’s a business suggestion for Hulu: offer an HTML5 player as a premium upgrade. Hulu plans to charge $10 per month. What if they offered — for, say, an extra $5 or $10 — “iPad-ready” video using HTML5?

Check out Hulu’s video introducing the new player.