The Hulu developers didn't pick Flash because it was "easy." They picked it because it allowed them to retain a high degree of control over their streaming video content -- control they would lose if they exposed an h.264 stream to an iPhone or iPad client.
I think it could be five years or more before anyone watches Hulu or Netflix on any of these devices.
No, I think the hulu developers picked flash because that's where the users are. They could have chosen java, or silverlight, but they chose flash for the same reason most sites choose flash. I'm sure if Hulu wanted to, they could develop a native app, just like the YouTube native app, for the iPhone, but my guess is that it wasn't part of their strategy initially.
If netflix wants the iPad users, they would develop their own native app and ship it just like the other dozens of apps out there. In fact, it would give Hulu & Netflix greater control over their users with a native app. Hulu has already developed a desktop app, why wouldn't they develop a native app for the iPhone?
Remember back in the IE4 & IE5 days? Lots of companies developed native ActiveX components that could be embedded into webpages because most users used IE4. I'm actually quite happy that Apple is forcing web companies out there to rethink open platforms. There's quite a few demos that show how powerful javascript & canvas can be already. It would be nice if we could replace the majority of flash apps with javascript, canvas, and webgl.
If Hulu or Netflix (which uses Silverlight) were to make a native application for iPad would Apple approve it? I don't know. Neither Hulu or Netflix could make an application without approval of both Apple and their content providers.
I don't think it's fair to say that the Hulu developers "picked" flash. The number of technologies suitable for displaying video on the web in a reasonable way (pre-html5) is extremely limited, flash is pretty much the only game in town. Vimeo, youtube, break, etc, they all use flash. Now HTML5 is at least a reasonable alternative for a small fraction of web users but still Flash is the only reasonable option for video on the web today.
It may also be worth nothing that those not located in America can't simply use a proxy to access Hulu because Flash doesn't obey system proxy settings -- a VPN is required. If strong region-restriction is a priority of Hulu's then this could be a disincentive towards them providing a non-Flash option.
This is a really good point actually. Hulu actually uses the encrypted variant of RTMP to deliver content, and decodes the stream in their flash player. If they were to deliver just raw h.264 through html5, they wouldn't be able to do this anymore.
Vevo (the music video people on youtube) are actually doing the same thing. You can't watch the videos without using the special flash player.
"Overall, then, the Adobe RTMPE algorithm tries to provide end-to-end secrecy in exactly the same way that SSL provides end-to-end secrecy, but the algorithm is subject to man-in-the-middle attacks, provides no security, relies on publicly obtainable information and the algorithm itself to obfuscate the content, and uses no authentication of any kind"
The Adobe response to this shoddy engineering being revealed? DMCA takedown requests to sourceforge:
I think it could be five years or more before anyone watches Hulu or Netflix on any of these devices.