Despite the seeming confusion over where exactly NBC is heading with its online video content – Hulu continues to push forward. Today they announced that they intend to support HD content – something iTunes STILL hasn’t done – and are previewing it already for select movie trailers. The clips are encoded at 1280×720 resolution.

All of this is made possible by the latest Adobe Flash Player (9), which includes the h.264 compression standard (which, again Apple is a big fan of) – however you will need a fast connection (over 2.4 Mbps for a smooth, non-buffering result) and a fast computer (my old iBook G4 laptop for example isn’t nearly fast enough and my desktop barely is) to view the clips in HD. Hulu is also unfortunately limiting the bitrates for the time being as they want to allow as many users as possible to test it out.

Still, any move in the direction of HD will get the thumbs up from me, and Hulu supporting it while they’re still in beta makes once wonder again just what is taking Apple – again, a huge proponent of h.264 – so long? If they really do up the price of movies on iTunes without a move to HD you can officially color me annoyed.

If you’re a member of the Hulu beta you can view the HD clips at http://www.hulu.com/hd.