The mobile video space has begun to consolidate. In early November 2011, Adobe announced it would stop developing its Flash Player for mobile devices (read: Android). Going forward, HTML5 will be the only method to play back video on mobile phones and tablets.
This is a big win for Apple, the company to most strongly oppose Flash over the last few years. The company is indeed beginning to dictate the industry’s future. In addition to defeating Flash in the battle for video playback, Apple continues to innovate with its H.264 codec, since WebM is still nowhere to be found.
The company has also taken the lead in video streaming. Apple’s homegrown streaming protocol, HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), has always been the one and only way to stream content to iDevices. Now, due to the popularity of iOS, many tool vendors and even competing platforms are starting to support it too.
Playback and Encoding
According to Adobe, Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) will be the last mobile platform to use a Flash plugin. The OS is launching without one, though. Given Flash’s terrible track record with mobile, it wouldn’t be surprising if it never arrives. Therefore, video publishers should ensure their Android video works in HTML5.
In terms of encoding, the H.264 codec is baked into the CPU of every single mobile phone today, while WebM is still confined to a software-only (and non-HTML5) implementation on some Android devices. Google is working on hardware, but the path from reference designs to phone integration, and eventually market share, is a long one.
Until WebM hardware decoding is supported by a decent slice of mobile devices, video publishers will continue to focus on H.264. Seeing this, Google continues to support H264 in Chrome, despite announcing that it would drop it almost a year ago. For all intents and purposes, H.264 is the baseline codec for HTML5 video at present.
The Apple Standard
For the foreseeable future, we’ll watch our mobile video the Apple way: HTML5 embedded, H.264 encoded and HLS streamed. Any platform seeking broad support for quality video (Windows Phone?) must implement HLS. And any publisher seeking mobile viewers must encode in H.264, embed using HTML5 and stream using HLS.
Is this a bad thing? Quite the contrary. The alternative is fragmentation: multiple plugins, multiple codecs and multiple protocols. This is an annoyance for large media corporations; it increases their development and delivery costs. However, it’s disastrous for smaller video publishers, since the companies lack the resources to build and support multi-platform video delivery. Ultimately, that is a detriment to mobile video. Like the web in general, mobile video thrives on broad availability of a wide variety of content.
A more open set of standards (WebM and DASH) should come in time. For now though, Apple is the standard.
from mashable
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