

Hulu on the iPad? Not as Easy as It Sounds - scapegraced
http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/03/10/10readwriteweb-hulu-on-the-ipad-not-as-easy-as-it-sounds-84239.html

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tumult
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.

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fnid2
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.

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ianbishop
_"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.

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gte910h
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.

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davidmurphy
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?

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gte910h
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.

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stuartjmoore
DRM.

