I think this is Hulu's attempt to make even more money on the iDevices.
I wonder if the iDevice had Flash, would they be able to do this?
I wonder if the iDevice had Flash, would they be able to do this?
Having played around with it (I hacked together a gnash+ffmpeg port that's just sufficient to run Hulu on my own iPhone), they just have some logic in their flash scripts to prevent playing on unlicensed platforms. And in order to prevent direct linking to the FLVs, they use some obfuscating logic -- namely, they give you a string + a key and have you perform an AES-style operation using the two locally to get a time-expiring key to the file you want to play. They change the obfuscating pattern just often enough to make it annoying if you were, say, trying to keep up a Boxee script or update an AppStore application.
Maybe if this was more along the lines of a $36 annual fee, similar to Pandora, I would give it more thought.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/20/flash-10-1-for-android-be...
The "problem" is that apparently mobile devices have to be licensed differently, and presumably more expensively. Which is, I presume, why you have to pay $10 a month to still have to endure ads on your iPhone.
In Hulu's case they are able to measure the number of people actually watching the videos.
Also if anything a paid subscriber would probably be less likely to pay attention to the ads, making the ad worth less.