Hulu coming to the iPad?

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Handhelds, Home Entertainment, Internet, Rumors

When Apple introduced the world to the original iPhone, YouTube wasn’t part of the equation, but in the weeks leading up to launch, Steve Jobs revealed that YouTube would in fact have a dedicated app built right in to the iPhone and that the company had started the task of re-encoding their videos to H.264 format, which plays nice with the device. Fast-forward to today, and we are hearing similar rumblings as it pertains to Hulu and the iPad.

The biggest complaint we are hearing about the iPad is that it lacks Flash support, which means that a device that seems to be perfect for watching videos on Hulu, has no way to actually accomplish that task. However, it seems that Hulu is already hard at work on an iPad-compatable version of the site. Now, we don’t know if this is actually going to be a Hulu app, similar to what YouTube has on the iPhone, or if Hulu is simply switching up it’s Flash player and adding support for HTML5. The nice thing here is that Hulu has been using H.264 compression in their videos since the beginning, so the only real change that needs to be made to be iPad-compatable is to allow videos to be played outside of the Flash player, and HTML5 solves that perfectly.

At this point, we wouldn’t be surprised if a week or two prior to the launch of the iPad, Apple let’s us know that USA-based iPads will ship with Hulu supported from day one.

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