Flash and the HTML5 Article, can anyone comment on this!!?

[Craig Seeman]

Ultimately that’s the way markets work for better or worse. The demand for VHS was much greater than BetaMax because the adult market drive sales/purchases more so than, let’s say for example, Sony movies.

One might ask why didn’t both survive just as we have Windows and Macs today. That depends on the market.

We certainly have multiple codecs and multiple delivery methods right now. But we also had both VHS and BetaMax for a time. I think there’s an “economy” to simplification and that’s one part of why I believe HTML5 H.264 will win.

Businesses that pay for encoding and delivery want to keep costs down. On the other hand they want to cast the widest possible net. Since H.264 fills about every niche I really don’t think WebM VP8 has a chance. The “open source” nature only has limited impact IMHO on the decisions vs costs. There’s the risk of license fee (which is minimal IMHO with MPEG-LA and most) vs the cost of encoding everything to WebM VP8. To me FireFox is NOT on very strong ground because there are other very popular browser people can jump to.

Flash vs HTML5 is a bit more complex and Flash currently has strong advantages. Those will decrease over time. It already has serious weakness given the growing share of web access from devices that can’t play flash or at all or very efficiently if they can.

Note that while BetaMax lost Beta itself had a very long and dominant run in the professional video market. Market bifurcation can happen. Actually it had been that why in the compression/delivery market as well. WMV, Flash, Quicktime catered to somewhat different and sometimes overlapping markets. Over time H.264 changed that . . . again because markets (when costs are involved) tend to simplify.

Silverlight and Flash are extension agnostic when it comes to H.264. both .mp4 and .mov will work. They’ll both work in Quicktime too. .f4v is Flash specific but I understand Adobe engineers have said there will be metadata advantages to that at some point. Alas the markets are moving much faster than Adobe is.

I should add now Microsoft Expression Encoder can do H.264 and WMP12 can playback H.264.

NetFlix is using Silverlight (and VC-1/WMV) for its VOD but that hasn’t resulted in Silverlight overrunning Flash. Given NetFlix is now aiming for the iOS market (HTML5 H.264) one has to wonder how their encoding/delivery decisions as well.

Basically every step of the way HTML5 H.264 is growing although currently that’s forcing many to deliver both Flash and HTML5. Don’t you think they’d want to shift to one delivery method to lower costs? Could Flash win that? Maybe but those circumstances are dwindling whereas the circumstances favoring HTML5 are growing. I think IE9 may actually be a big player in this at least as far as VOD (interactivity is another story). Microsoft would love to “force” users away from FireFox and back to IE.