Hulu is finally letting users download content to their iPhones and iPads, more than a year after it announced that it would enable the feature.

For now, only subscribers to Hulu’s high-end, $12-a-month commercial-free tier can download shows and movies, and they can only download them to iOS devices—Android compatibility will come soon, the joint venture said.

Those meeting the criteria will have access to “thousands” of shows and movies, under terms that are pretty similar to transactional stores like Apple’s iTunes. Users will have 30 days to consume downloaded content, or 48 hours once they started watching it.

If the user misses the window, content can be downloaded again, and the clock starts all over.

Hulu, which is now majority-owned by Disney, is hardly first out of the gate with downloads to mobile devices, a nifty feature for consumers for plane rides and other applications. Netflix started doing it several years ago, albeit reluctantly.

So what has taken the major SVOD services so long to enable downloads?

Certainly, content security is an issue—you have to invest in the kinds of security technologies that make your content partners feel OK about letting consumers put movies and shows on their hard drives.

More than that, digital companies like Hulu are just getting started with advanced advertising businesses that are built around streaming. And data collection is also limited when consumers control the goods.

Penthera Partners, a company that specializes in software that manages the secure downloading of TV shows, movies and other large digital files to mobile devices, said it as received a $6 million investment from Liberty Global Ventures, the venture capital investment arm of cable legend John Malone’s international cable giant Liberty Global.

"I am truly excited that Liberty Global will be helping us grow Penthera and realize the full potential of our technology,” Penthera CEO Michael Willner said in a statement. “Proceeds from this financing will be used to expand our worldwide sales efforts and accelerate the development of new products and enhancements to our existing products."

Penthera develops software that allows customers to watch content when they don’t have access to a suitable internet connection. Its products have been used by several content providers servicing millions of users, including Showtime, Starz, Comcast, and Charter Communications.

"After vetting available technologies we were impressed with the feature sets included in Penthera's SDK,” Liberty Global chief technology officer (Europe) Dan Hennessy said in a statement. “Whether it's for viewing video when connectivity is limited, intermittent or expensive, downloading is a feature we know customers want and will value greatly, which is why we decided to invest in the company."  

If you live in a Verizon FiOS market, you’ve likely seen the video ads denouncing upstream speeds other than theirs. If not, here’s the gist of it: Families, at home, surfing the Web but running into slowdowns when posting music and video. The tagline? “Stop living with half-fast Internet,” voiced by Modern Family’s famously funny Ty Burrell, a Verizon spokesman.

On the one hand, “half-fast” is a brilliant and funny play on words, not unlike Kmart’s “shipped its pants” campaign, or the lesser known but still funny pairing of “sofa” with “king,” to emphasize how very … anything … something is. (“That is sofa king good.”)

As someone who perennially frets about the state of the upstream/home-to-head-end signal direction, on the other hand, it’s another reminder about the growing plausibility of symmetrical network traffic — meaning an environment where as much stuff flows out of a home as flows into it.

For the longest time, now included, we’ve not really had a need for symmetry. Think about it. When you click to retrieve a Web page or to initiate a video stream, that click is tiny compared to what comes back. In general, and at any given time, we’re using way more downstream capacity.

For me, the first vestige of the potential for upstream capacity calamities came last spring, when my colleague Sara set up a chicken incubator at her farm. She used a paper clip to kickstand an old iPhone, which live-streamed the incubation action.

It was a forehead-smack moment: Video is big. Webcams stream it. Uh-oh, upstream path. Cameras that stream become part of the machine-to-machine scene, consuming bandwidth in ways not before seen.

Then, this year, the GoPro camera craze intensified. It won’t take too many of them, strapped to the dog’s head, or the kid’s bike, to gum up the upstream path.

The bandwidth-keepers in my circles assure me (repeatedly) that from a normal traffic- loading perspective, we’re nowhere near the need to build for network symmetry — or as much data moving away from you as toward you.

That said, there’s no shortage of gadgetry in our lives that can capture and stream video, especially those that can be triggered to run remotely — you’re at work, but someone rings the doorbell at home. Who is it? See for yourself, via a live video stream.

One thing is certain: We can expect more video running upstream, coincident with the webcams and GoPros we use. That alone will contribute to a tilt toward symmetry.

As a result, the widening of the upstream path will likely go from “not in my lifetime” — the decades-old answer among technologists — to lots more trial expansions next year.

Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis at translation-please.com or multichannel.com/blog.