Ever since Apple originated consumer computer video with Quicktime back in the early 1990s, they've done a great deal to make it better, first for CD Roms and in a proprietary fashion. But when the net came around they opened up their proprietary format to become a standard-- the Mpeg4 file format is the old MOV format. They've also proposed a lot of improvements along these lines for other people to adopt.
Like Bonjour, I really don't understand why other companies don't adopt these open standards. They don't benefit Apple particularly. It's not like Apple has some competitive advantage in HTTP Live Streaming. Meanwhile these competitors rush to copy everything else Apple does.
Frankly, I think its appalling that youtube, for instance, is still running on flash. How many years ago did they first trial MP4 streaming? Why I can't I access all the videos over MP4?
Why would you want your browser to be bad at streaming video?
None of those things are open standards. Both Mpeg4 and "Bonjour" require a licence to utilise. Maybe that answers your question, people don't want to pay Apple oodles of money?
> Frankly, I think its appalling that youtube, for instance, is still running on flash.
Everyone can turn on HTML5 for YouTube if they wish. They offer both. They give you the choice, the default is Flash (but Flash still has the widest support on older platforms).
> Why I can't I access all the videos over MP4?
Because people would have to pay licensing fees several times for the same stream (e.g. sender and receiver both have to pay $$$, sometimes the sender, browser vendor AND OS vendor have to pay $$$).
> Meanwhile these competitors rush to copy everything else Apple does.
And Apple copies everything their competitors do also. Just look at iOS 8, that was just copying some of the best features from their competition (not that I blame them, they were right to do so).
The new keyboard (Android), third party keyboards (Android), "Handoff" (everyone else), Spotlight web-search (everyone else), etc.
Apple hasn't done anything original since Jobs died.
> Ever since Apple originated consumer computer video with Quicktime back in the early 1990s
I think that honor befalls the ITU with their H.261. It's only a few years difference and it definitely was never as wide spread as Quicktime but that's the first format that I remember that actually worked. It never succeeded on the web though there were a couple of companies that tried to do this using so called browser plug-ins.
Live streaming is mostly the domain of RTMP these days, HTTP doesn't lend itself well to live (but works just fine for streaming stored content).
As for why browsers don't all do MP4, you could ask why browsers do not natively support RTMP, that would solve the whole problem in one go.
What, what? YouTube has been doing an HTML5 based web player for quite some time now[1], and I believe it supports FLV video as well, though I can't find a reference for that.
I have uninstalled Flash from my system. A great many videos on YouTube give me the "you need the latest flash player to watch this video" error.
Yes, several years ago, I was getting MP4 video, and today, a portion (say %30-%40) just launch with MP4. But most of the time I get the "you need flash".
It's really weird. Using the built-in HTML5 player, half the videos don't load. But those videos do exist — Google just doesn't want you to be able to access them easily. I can watch them on my iOS devices, I can download them using dirpy.com, and I can watch them in my browser using the YouTube5 plugin.
There are many protocols, including HTTP Live Streaming, RTSP, RTP, MMS, used by multiple browser plugins, such as QuickTime, Flash, Windows Media Player. A comprehensive list of such systems is on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_streaming_media_s...
Twitch uses HLS with a Flash front end. No idea about the others.
HLS is nice because it doesn't require any new servers or protocols -- it uses vanilla HTTP, and can be served up by basically any web server. As a result, it's much easier to make it work with a CDN.
I guess the reason of having such poor support outside Apple browsers, despite the benefits, has to do with licensing issues and the complications of embedding ads, as someone pointed out.
Like Bonjour, I really don't understand why other companies don't adopt these open standards. They don't benefit Apple particularly. It's not like Apple has some competitive advantage in HTTP Live Streaming. Meanwhile these competitors rush to copy everything else Apple does.
Frankly, I think its appalling that youtube, for instance, is still running on flash. How many years ago did they first trial MP4 streaming? Why I can't I access all the videos over MP4?
Why would you want your browser to be bad at streaming video?