Live Internet Television

I Twitter-voted for the iPhone as the most revolutionary productivity tool I adopted in the past year but that doesn’t stop me from going on about how the lack of Flash makes a lot of things invisible to me on the iPhone. I consider Flash overused anyway, so to have all Flash content appear as a little blue lego-thingy or a get-Flash message is extra annoying to me.

Now that TV.com is going after Hulu so aggressively, and has beat them to market with an iPhone app, I’m guessing Hulu, Apple and Adobe will be in even more intensive and productive talks to get Flash onto the iPhone ASAP.  WebTVWire writes:

Just a few days ago, TV.com announced it would be making some short-form content available internationally, breaking the site free of its U.S. only shackles. This is something Hulu has hinted at for months but never actually delivered on.

And now the CBS-owned TV.com has beat Hulu to the punch again, this time releasing an iPhone application. The app offers all iPhone and iPod Touch users the chance to watch TV.com content on their mobile device.

[...] The biggest problem for Hulu is that it uses Adobe Flash to deliver video content, and Flash isn’t yet compatible with the iPhone and many other of the new-generation of mobile devices. Hulu has indicated it’s working on a iPhone app but it’s relying on Apple and Adobe to work together to make Flash available on the iPhone.

It goes without saying that I rushed to download the TV.com iPhone app to check it out. I didn’t find anything I wanted to watch in full episodes, but I did find the utterly charming James Norton of Chow.com doing 1:11 tastings — including a baby food tasting in which he tried to channel his infant palate. His other short tasting videos are great as well.

The TV.com site doesn’t mention the iPhone app, but it does mention episodes of something I found hilarious to imagine — and could only imagine because no episodes were actually available to watch. Perhaps it’s better to imagine than watch anyway when the shows are:

Infighting among strange bedfellows says a lot about future plans: Co-incident with CBS relaunching C|Net-acquired TV.com into a potential rival of Hulu, Hulu pulled its content from the site.

Hulu, backed by NBC and News Corporation, competes with CBS in the traditional television markets.  Hulu’s quick-fire removal of their content from TV.com shows that they are planning on fighting it out online as well.

Hulu and TV.com are tight-lipped about the contracted rights, but it appears that TV.com was caught slightly unaware with “video unavailable” riddling their site on all content provided by Hulu.

ivi’s mantra: Internet television must and will improve!