Is Hulu coming to the iPhone / Touch?
By Michael W. Jones
It’s only a rumor, but it is growing fast and it says that the content of the wildly popular video site Hulu is coming soon to the iPhone and iPod Touch as a downloadable application.
Hulu is a website that offers commercial-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies from NBC, Fox and many other networks and studios. Hulu videos are currently offered only to users in the United States. Hulu usually provides video in Flash Video format, including many films and shows that are available in 480p and high-definition. Hulu also provides web syndication services for other websites including AOL, MSN, MySpace, Yahoo! and Comcast’s Fancast.com. Hulu is the sixth most popular video download site, well behind the number one site Youtube, which is owned by Google.
Since the iPhone does not support Flash, the rumored iPhone Hulu app would have to stream the video some other way. It is not clear whether the new app will be released before or after the introduction of the new iPhone models and operating system 3.0, due in June or July of this year. Sources say only that the Hulu application on the iPhone will be as good as the Website and is only months away from coming to the App Store.
There seems to be considerable demand for such a service. Mobile video solutions provider QuickPlay Media recently commissioned an independent Market Tools survey focused on mobile video consumption in the United States, according to eWeek. The survey found that that most people expect video to be a regular component of cell phone usage sometime in the next year. Even now, about 35 percent of the users of mobile devices say they currently watch video on their mobile devices.
It is easy to characterize the mobile video market as being just on the edge of exploding. Smart phones with good display capabilities are becoming much more common just as more and better content is becoming available form a number of quality providers on the net. At the junction of those two technologies lies a pile of money that video and phone producers alike are after.
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