Hulu developers have come out describing HTML5 as not ready to deliver video content, and that Adobe’s Flash still reigns supreme.
“When it comes to technology, our only guiding principle is to best serve the needs of all of our key customers: our viewers, our content partners who license programs to us, our advertisers, and each other. We continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn’t yet meet all of our customers’ needs. Our player doesn’t just simply stream video, it must also secure the content, handle reporting for our advertisers, render the video using a high performance codec to ensure premium visual quality, communicate back with the server to determine how long to buffer and what bitrate to stream, and dozens of other things that aren’t necessarily visible to the end user. Not all video sites have these needs, but for our business these are all important and often contractual requirements” wrote Eugene Wei, VP of Product at Hulu.
With Apple putting all its eggs in the HTML5 basket, it seems others aren’t so sure. Adobe’s concerns appear valid, and today launched its We Love Choice campaign.
“At Adobe, we believe that the open flow of creativity, ideas, and information should be limited only by the imagination. Innovation thrives when people are free to choose the technologies that enable them to openly express themselves and access information where and when they want. Everyone loses when technological barriers impede the exchange of ideas” the campaign says.
It’s clear the HTML5 vs Flash debate is far from over.
Mozilla Developer Rob Cambell has revealed that Firefox 4 is recieving a new DOM inspector, similar to what is found in other browsers, after it was removed from Firefox 3.