Rumor: Hulu headed to the iPhone

Update: a representative for Hulu tells us: "Currently there is no plan to announce Hulu on the iPhone/iPod. We are focused on a free, streaming, ad-supported service."

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MacRumors.com is reporting a "page 2" news item about Hulu.com rolling out a version of the video service that's been specially designed for users of the iPhone and iPod touch later this week. Presumably having seen what the BBC has done with its iPlayer streaming service, it would only be available over Wi-Fi because of EDGE network limitations. The move would also mark the first major content offering from NBC on an Apple-made product since it jumped ship from iTunes back in August of last year.

To make money off mobile users I could envision Hulu going one of two routes. The first would be to autodetect when people are coming to the mobile site from a compatible phone and change the streams to ones that have advertisements included as part of the video--similar to what's been done with podcasts. The other way would be to break up the content into pieces and add advertisements in between each chunk, which is what Hulu.com currently does for streaming shows via Adobe's Flash player.

If this does come to fruition I could see a lot of people moving away from buying overlapping content seen on iTunes. While the benefit of purchasing on iTunes is that you can watch them away from a connection, Hulu's potential free price and minimal requirement of having a Wi-Fi connection might be enough to keep someone (myself included) from wanting to shell out $2 for a show.

What do you think?

[madcasey]

I find the results of the poll on this post extremely interesting. It seems, and services like Amazon Unbox have learned this first hand, that on overwhelming majority of people would rather see ads than pay even a small price for video content.

This shouldn't be surprising to anyone. iTunes works well for music because people often only want the hit song from an artist, and cost and effort are minimal in downloading a song.

An HD episode of CSI, on the other hand, isn't something people want to pay for, even just two dollars. People prefer to own entire seasons, on DVD, so they can easily watch it on their TV. Until there's a popular and simply way to stream downloaded content from your PC to your TV, people won't want to buy individual episodes just to watch them once on their often inferior PC monitor.

Web content is whim-based, and I mean that in the best possible way. Facebook isn't popular because it's a powerful platform for planning or working -- it's popular because it caters to people's whims. Shoot a message to an old college buddy, fill out an NCAA bracket, read a movie review, play a flash game -- do all of that in five minutes, based purely on your whims.

When you try to reapply whim-based consumption into a digital storefront like iTunes, people will be turned off. Pulling out your credit card and buying something takes you out of the cerebral and places you into the material world of consumption, and that's not what people look for on the web. They'd much rather watch a video on Hulu with commercials based on a flight of fancy -- there's no commitment, no obligation. This is exactly why YouTube is so popular, and no one seems to understand why.

The reason is, there is no reason. People are just messing around. And I that's a good thing, not an insult.

[JonTitor]

I'd rather like to see it work on Windows Mobile before iPhone, despite Apple's overwhelming popularity, WinMo still got bigger share and not to mention Hulu is kinda meant to compete with Apple to some level. I tried playing it using FlashVideoBundle for the WinMo, no luck

[Josh.Lowensohn]

In theory an MPEG4 H.264 encoded stream would work on Windows Mobile as well if you've got the right app. Not sure if the latest version of WMP mobile can handle that.