Hulu Launches A New Video Player

Guided Tour.

Hulu just got a lot better. The new video player has a 25 percent larger viewing area, controls are hidden by default during video viewing, and some have been moved. They’ve also announced that, for the time being, Hulu is sticking with Flash. VP of product, Eugene Wei, says HTML5 video isn’t ready to serve the needs of all its customers.

On the backend, there’s adaptive bitrate streaming to automatically downshift the bitrate of the video stream if playback or diminished bandwidth issues are detected. Ad volume normalization reduces the volume of overly loud commercials. Seek Preview displays a preview thumbnail when the mouse hovers over a spot in the timeline, and a “Heat Map” feature shows the relative popularity of various sections of the video.

The new Ad Tailor replaces the old “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” buttons on ads with a “yes” or “no” answer choice to the question, “Is this ad relevant to you?” They will also try to improve ad relevance by occasionally substituting a short survey instead of an ad.

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