Here’s Why Hulu Wasn’t Available When Switch Launched

During a recent IGN podcast, Julian Eggebrecht, the President of Factor 5 who also happens to be the Vice President of tech at Hulu, gave an explanation on why Hulu wasn’t available the day the Nintendo Switch launched.

Part of the reason is attributed to “political decisions” made by Nintendo, and also the lack of certain encryption technology video on demand providers like Hulu and Netflix require platform holders to have. You can read Eggebrecht’s full explanation below.

Why not at launch? That was a political decision by Nintendo to a certain degree, but also a technical one because they really wanted to focus on the game-side of things on the one hand, and secondly really were only able to provide the basic technical functionality that you needed to make the greatest games on the new console. So one of the things which was missing until recently was one tiny little bit of encryption that most of the professional video services unfortunately need, and once that was unblocked for us, it was not a problem to get the whole thing going. We had the streaming actually and most of the tech we had done quite awhile ago.