Hulu on the iPad? Not as Easy as It Sounds | Hacker News Reader

Hulu on the iPad? Not as Easy as It Sounds

nytimes.com

8 pointsscapegraced9 comments

I was going to copy and paste some choice dumb quotes from this, but apparently I'm not allowed to select text or something on NYT, since they use JS to remove my selection as soon as I make it. I added nytimes.com to my HN filter. Sorry if this comment is kind of useless for actual discussion of the article, but I had thought NYT didn't put out crap like this or (once you got in, anyway) do shady stuff on their site.

edit: I guess it's one of those insert-shit-into-your-clipboard-when-you-try-to-copy-text things, except it's breaking in Chromium in Linux for me.

The only way I could replicate this is through selecting some text, then clicking until the ? appears (which lets you search their site for the selected text) and then clicking somewhere else. The ? goes away and takes the selected text. But I think it's unintentional and do no believe they are intentionally trying to keep you from selecting text. I was able to keep the selection there.

I can cut and paste just fine.

"Hulu app could launch a player on the iPhone or iPad, if, of course, Apple allowed them to do so. If not, then a mobile site would have to be built in HTML5, video controls, overall UI, advertisements and all. That's no simple process."

I'm not really sure that writing a new Objective-C player is tremendously easier than writing an HTML 5 one. If it were, wouldn't they have already done this for the iPhone?

At least everyone would benefit from the option of getting rid of flash if they did write a seamless HTML 5 rendition.

Title is Bullllllllllllllllllllshit.

They could have an app up in a couple weeks that streamed select shows. They could have their entire library up as soon as they got their entire library up (which is basically a process of running 2 programs on each show, a possibly scriptable task, which likely should be quality checked by a human). The protocol and video player are extremely advertising friendly on the iPhone.

Apple might not approve them, but it's not exactly a huge expense to find out.

If they're changing business model and chose to not find out is one thing. But this is NOT a hard technical problem.

Disclosure: I do custom 3rd party iphone apps for a living, including streaming video.

Interesting. Let me ask the HN community this: I am exploring a niche web video startup that targets a demographic that would lend itself to having an iPad/iPhone app.

Here's the question though: should I plan to actually code an app, or should I just go for HTML5? What would you do?

You can do an app pretty quickly actually.

The livestreaming tech isn't hard. (If you check out my profile, there is an email there which will forward to my work account, we do that sort of work there, so my advice is not completely unselfishly motivated) and it does adjust pretty well between different network conditions.

I'm not an HTML5 expert though, so can't really offer you a contrast.

Definitely go for HTML5, mostly h.264, since HTML5, Flash, and iPhone all use that standard (for the most part). Plus, Palm WebOS and Android.

But, if you have the resources, you might as well have an app. Think of the App Store as free advertising.

DRM.

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