Tumble, coil & fumble

In a recent company blog Hulu’s Eugene Wei addressed why they’d not like to evolve their user experience with HTML5 based players.

Whoever advises Hulu on these decisions is a threat to the company. They clearly have little to no understanding of anything beyond Flash.

Let’s see. Wei stated that HTML5 does not have DRM and may eventually get DRM features in the future. Nope, not gonna happen. It’s a markup language not a bloody miracle! Maybe their advisor isn’t stupid but bought, I don’t know, could be either.

At the core it’s a business decision. HTML5 with custom JavaScript components and maybe even a full-on in-browser app written in Objective-J would save Hulu license costs in the $10K US range per month.

Without site-wide company licenses for the Flash authoring app, the Adobe Media Server and their DRM. The running cost there would drop to zero. Why? Open Standards mean they are open, you’re not held captive by the pocketbook of a single corporation.

But this freedom comes at a price, you need to use your own brain to create something new. Right now Hulu’s current DRM is fairly useless, I’m still able to download (albeit in real-time) episodes without ads, the ads aren’t video, so a stream grabber won’t see them and end the file, then create a new one with the next incoming video. Then I can drag the folder into VLC and watch without interruption. Sweet.

So not only would Hulu be able to tap into a market that avidly consumes media and is willing to pay for it, but also be friendly to people with computers older than a year or two. In essence they’d increase their demographic.

HTML5 video uses the native video player of the system which often is hardware accelerated via the graphics card. Also the gigantic memory overhead is gone. You need a modern browser for that and SHOCKER, they are less power hungry than the browsers we had in the olden days.

With Flash video, there really is nothing directly comparable to HTML5 video. When you embed a Flash player you’re effectively creating an application with its own interface that plays back your video. That application runs on its own runtime which is an additional application layer on top of the ones your operating system already has running. Sounds a bit stupid? I never said it was smart.

HTML5 is not a direct Flash replacement, it requires a different approach of reaching the same result. The benefit of betting on a rapidly evolving standard is, well… it’s evolving rapidly and besides saving money on the way it also makes your users like you more.

Not crashing their browsers or phones goes a long way with audience loyalty.