

Brightcove Sidestepping Lack of Flash Support on Apple iPad - erinkutz
http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2010/03/29/brightcove-sidestepping-lack-of-flash-support-on-apple-ipad/

======
whalesalad
This is _so good_ for everyone. Apple is totally going to take Flash down, and
I can't wait. It's slow, it crashes, and it's old.

This is somewhat anecdotal, but a coworker at my previous startup came from
Adobe, and said that the flash player team was total chaos (and surprisingly
small), and there were separate teams for each platform.

I can't wait for Flash to die completely. I have absolutely no appreciation
for it.

------
pierrefar
This quote jumps out:

"But Whatcott told me last month that the company has "no platform leanings"
and that its first priority is to help customers distribute video as widely as
possible."

The more companies that adapt because they have no "platform leanings", the
more the grip of Flash is loosened. This is format war is going to get very
interesting very soon.

~~~
Terretta
In an ideal world, neither the content owner nor the neophyte end user should
even have to know, while power users get choice.

We've been quietly offering a player stack for months now: generally HTML5 >
Silverlight > QT > Flash. Customers and viewers are delighted when the video
plays on nearly anything w/o any extra effort. ("How'd you get this to work on
my phone?!?")

Looks like our next step is using the HTML5 video tag as a placeholder for
progressive enhancement though a better term for this use might be legacy
enhancement. We want it to "just work" for most users, but let power users
select the player that works best on their system (eg., hardware decoding
support).

Choice of player should be at least as available as choice of video card for
enthusiasts, and preferably as easy as choice of TV set for anyone.

------
ZeroGravitas
On their demo site they stretch the video, making it look janky on Chrome at
least (I think that Safari resizes better but it's still not going to look as
good as 1:1 pixel size) for no obvious reason or gain.

<http://www.brightcove.com/en/video-platform/solutions/html5>

They also claim to have all the things that the article says are missing
compared with their Flash based system, compare:

" _But publishers can’t yet use it to create custom-branded players, compile
audience analytics, provide viewers with social-media sharing options,
or—crucially—serve up advertising._ "

" _New HTML5 templates provide multi-title playlists, analytics tracking,
social sharing controls, advertising insertion, and other capabilities to
provide a customizable video experience built on open standards._ "

(I'll note again my personal pet peeve of using a non-open standard like H.264
while claiming it is _open_. If your customers value open standards so much,
perhaps you should use them, no?)

~~~
CoryMathews
"(I'll note again my personal pet peeve of using a non-open standard like
H.264 while claiming it is open. If your customers value open standards so
much, perhaps you should use them, no?)"

Completely agree. The marketing people have come in on this whole html5 thing
and make using the proprietary H.264 seem open even though it is no more open
then flash..

~~~
count
H.264 is OPEN. It's just not FREE. There's a big difference in the two.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
It's not an "open standard" according to most definitions, just a "standard":

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard>

~~~
Terretta
A careful reading of your link seems to support parent's comment.

~~~
smackfu
That link has 14 different definitions of "open standard".

~~~
ZeroGravitas
And 12 say "open standards" can't have patent royalties (i.e. H.264 is not an
open standard).

1, which just happens to be a statement from a body that issues patent royalty
bearing telecommunication standards, and which is explicitly responding to
industry moves that prompted the other 12 definitions of "open standards"
says, actually our standards have always been "open" and they include patent
royalties.

Note that no other such body I'm aware of (such as ISO, MPEG, IETF) declares
their royalty bearing standards as "open standards".

(The other one is just a historical curiosity, like someone referring to their
source code being "open" years before "open source" was a thing)

------
yardie
I don't like the idea of flash not being available on the iPhoneOS platform.
But I do think that Apple has done more to advance the adoption of HTML5 than
any other company except, possibly, Google. You young whippersnappers probably
don't remember that it took 3-4 years before HTML 4 was widely adopted.

------
aphyr
Anyone out there have ideas about _embedding_ HTML5 videos on other sites? I
love that we can implement controls, playlists, etc., all in JS, but I do
wonder how to safely hand off those features to another site, like the embed
tag does for flash. Iframes, maybe?

------
jsz0
I'm looking forward to having the option to prefer HTML5 video over Flash on
my desktop browser. The average low quality Flash video pegs my CPU at 99.7%
while a 1080P H264 file in VLC and it hovers around 60%

------
CoryMathews
I'm all for html5 video for displaying video over flash but..

H.264 is going to come back and bite everyone who uses it. Its just a matter
of time.

