Free Hulu movies and TV shows could hit the iPad

Remember how an unnamed entertainment industry exec allegedly said last summer that Apple’s tablet will be “fabulous” for watching movies? Surprising then how Steve Jobs announced no new content deals at the iPad unveiling, leaving many folks scratching their head.

According to TechCrunch, the lack of Flash player on the iPad doesn’t have to mean that users will get movies and TV shows exclusively via Apple’s iTunes. The publication wrote Tuesday that Hulu video, the second-largest video library on the Internet, is developing a workaround solution that should unleash the vast catalog of movies and TV shows on the iPad outside the Flash-based Hulu.com site. An industry insider alleged to Eric Schonfeld, the author of the report, that Hulu is working on an iPad-friendly version of its site that should be ready by the time the iPad hits the market late March.

This potentially killer move would bypass Apple’s entertainment ecosystem entirely and Apple may be unable to do anything about it. Hulu has been encoding its videos in H.264 since the summer 2008. Because the Flash player supports H.264 out-of-the-box, the Hulu.com backend needn’t be changed. The site still serves both Flash- and H.264-encoded videos through the Flash player. Schonfeld explained how Hulu might serve its existing H.264-encoded video library to the iPad:

They could build a custom iPad/iPhone app with its own player, or rewrite the site in Javascript for the iPad/iPhone browser.

Read more at TechCrunch
Christian’s Opinion

The H.264 trick helped Apple put YouTube videos on the iPhone even though the handset still doesn’t support Flash. When the original iPhone had been announced three years ago, Steve Jobs had cut a deal with Google that saw the search firm re-encode the entire YouTube video library in H.264. When you tap inline YouTube videos in mobile Safari on your iPhone, the YouTube app retrieves a H.264 version off Google’s servers. Encouarged by that experiment, Google fully embraced H.264 on the YouTube backend. When Adobe updated the Flash player with H.264 support, YouTube began encoding all video uploads in H.264 due to its bandwidth-savvy nature and superior quality.

The search firm is now experimenting with a HTML5-based YouTube player that needs no browser plugin in order to stream the videos – a tell tale sign that YouTube could abandon Flash technology and take the HTML5 route. When that comes to be, rival video sharing sites are likely to follow suit. As a result, all those videos encoded with Flash Video codec will be viewable on the iPhone and iPad because mobile and desktop Safari support the latest HTML5 specification. Meanwhile, Apple probably has no interest in helping Hulu put its free movies and TV shows on the iPad. Who in their right mind would buy or rent TV shows on iTunes – even at 99 cents per episode – if they’ll be a tap away on Hulu.com, free of charge in exchange for a few ads?