Will Apple Ban Hulu from the iPad?

According to a TechCrunch rumor, a Hulu app is getting prepped for the iPad launch next month. As much as Hulu fans would love to see it, Apple shouldn't - - and perhaps won't - - approve the app for use on the iPad. Why not?

Apple wants users to pay for content: The most obvious problem is that the NBC, ABC and other network programming currently available for free on Hulu costs up to $1.99 per episode through the Apple Store. Furthermore, the Apple-purchased episodes can only be viewed on an Apple device, while Hulu's content can be viewed on any Flash-enabled browser. Who in their right mind would pay for Ugly Betty (R.I.P.) when it is available for free online on the same device?

Apple doesn't want competition for paid content: The worst-kept secret in the world right now is that Hulu will begin charging for its content this year. This would jive perfectly with Apple's in-app purchase capability. The glitch is that, even if Apple gets a piece of the in-app action, it still wouldn't equal what the company would get from a direct Apple Store purchase.

Apple still believes in Apple TV: You can almost see Steve Jobs plotting an idealized universe where one piece of programming can be viewed on the phone, on the tablet and on the television. Hulu, Boxee and other self-contained, hardware-circumventing media programs undermine that principle.

The good news is that, according to TechCrunch, the iPad's lack of support for Adobe's Flash isn't an issue for Flash-based Hulu:

Getting Hulu to work on the iPad would not take as much work as some might expect. The biggest challenge to getting a large video library to play on the iPad (or iPhone) is to convert the underlying video files to the H.264 standard. Fortunately for Hulu, its videos are already encoded in H.264 and have been since the summer of 2008. So it doesn't have to go back and re-encode all of its videos. But on the front-end, it would have to create a non-Flash player (Flash plays videos encoded in H.264 as does the Quicktime player on the iPad and iPhone)... Getting Hulu's videos to play on the iPad is not that big a deal. They could just do what YouTube does and pop open the Quicktime player when a viewer tries to click on a video in their browser.

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/sonictk/ / CC BY 2.0