Hulu made some exciting announcements today about some new enhancements to their site. They also made some pretty clear statements about the future of HTML5 and Hulu.

“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.”

Hulu is quite clear that they know that HTML5 might have all of these capabilities in the future, just not right now. So for the foreseeable future it looks like Hulu will be sticking with Flash and will not be making an appearance on the iPad’s and iPhones.

There’s just one thing that I don’t understand. CBS is now streaming videos on HTML5 and their content is secure. I would imagine that CBS has the same needs for security, quality and advertising as Hulu. So how can HTML5 be good enough for CBS but not for Hulu? Interesting. Now, Hulu does not come right out and say that they aren’t working on an iPad/iPhone friendly option, they are simply sharing their stance on HTML5. There are other options. Netflix and ABC opted to create App’s for the iPad over converting their videos to HTML5. So, perhaps Hulu is looking at creating an App and is not ready to make an announcement yet. We shall see. But for Hulu to blame the available technology when CBS, ABC and Netflix are making it happen is ridiculous.