

Googe v Adobe, new game? - access_denied
http://www.cringely.com/2009/08/google-taketh-away/

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s3graham
I'm not sure I buy this as the reason. They're not going to drop the Flash
version on YT, and people aren't going to upgrade to a very new browser with
On2-supporting-<video> for no obvious difference in quality.

My guess, knowing nothing at all, is that it's probably 100M for some patents,
either to push into the <video> standard, or to fend of something they think
is coming.

Also, how do Adobe & Docs compete?

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access_denied
The long-term plan is to drop support for Flash on YT, isn't it?

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pavlov
Are you sure about that?

Flash has one significant advantage over plain <video> in a browser: it's got
a guaranteed compositing model. This is important for YouTube because they
display advertisements as alpha-blended overlays on top of the video.

If they switched to <video>, there would be no guarantees whether a browser
supports compositing of <div>s over a video layer. On some platforms video
hardware acceleration is implemented in such a way that it's not possible to
render any other content over the accelerated video window, so just checking
by user agent wouldn't be sufficient to ensure that compositing is available.

It's a can of worms that YouTube might not want to open, considering the
increasing importance of on-video ads to their revenues.

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tumult
I think freeing themselves from Flash is worth potentially having to display
ads beside a video instead of on it.

In WebKit, you can composite on top no problem. I would be surprised if it
doesn't turn out that way in Firefox.

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pavlov
_I think freeing themselves from Flash is worth potentially having to display
ads beside a video instead of on it._

I don't have any numbers to support this assertion, but I'm convinced that the
on-video ads are enormously more effective than any alternative that would
place the ads outside the video frame. (For one, the on-video ads are in a
location where viewers are conditioned to watch for subtitles, which makes
them that much more difficult to avoid.)

 _In WebKit, you can composite on top no problem._

Not everywhere. I'd bet it doesn't work in Nokia's WebKit browser on Symbian
because the platform doesn't support compositing on accelerated video. The
same problem may exist on Windows (depending on graphics drivers and DWM), if
<video> rendering is implemented using DirectShow.

