The inevitable evolution to higher quality online video has taken a significant step forward with the decision by Hulu, the News Corp/NBC Universal joint venture, to stream some clips in the HD high quality formats of 1280 x 720 resolution and 2,500Kbps.

The initial clips will be move trailers from Fox and Universal studios, a Hulu spokesperson told Beet.TV.  Some of the details are posted on the Hulu blog.

Just yesterday, Adobe announced plans to encoding video to the super high quality H.264 format. 

Advances in encoding is making possible the compressing such large files into relatively small pipes.

Last month at the Streaming Media West conference in San Jose, I caught up with On2’s Bill Joll who explains and demonstrates the striking new look of HD Flash video.  Adobe licenses encoding technology from On2.

— Andy Plesser