Hulu. On the iPad. Without Flash.

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Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch has heard from an “industry insider” that Hulu is not only developing an iPhone app but that it will be ready in time for the launch of the Apple iPad.

For those who know how Hulu works, this is not a huge technical leap, but a smart business decision. Hulu’s video is already encoded in H.264 which plays natively on the iPhone so the company would have to make one decision: load the videos in Safari using a custom HTML5 player or hand them off to the native Quicktime Player for playback.

Running the Hulu business will be a bit trickier.

All of their advertising – pre-rolls, mid-rolls, post-rolls and overlays – are designed to run in their customer Flash player. Since their analytics also rely heavily on this player, the Hulu tech team would have to rewrite the way ads are targeted, delivered and measured in the new javascript player.

Still, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar is a smart guy and will do what’s best for the company’s growth.

I’m not sure I agree with Erick’s summation that “the iPad needs Hulu more than Hulu needs the iPad,” but yes, having native Hulu playback on the iPad would be a boon for Apple.

[TechCrunch]

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