The Present and Future of HTML5 Video Experiences
As commercial availability of the Apple iPad draws near, we have been getting a lot of inquiries from customers looking for guidance on what they need to do to deliver great video experiences on these devices that exclusively support the HTML5 approach to video.
Context & Ripple Effects
With the iPad's commercial availability imminent — Apple has already seeded developers the Golden Master build of the iPhone OS 3.2 SDK as the shipping toolkit — Brightcove reports a wave of customer inquiries about serving video to a device that supports only the HTML5 approach. The story traveled immediately: TechCrunch picked it up the same day under the framing 'No Flash On The iPad? No Problem,' casting Brightcove's guidance as a workaround playbook for publishers.
What makes the moment notable is that a major video-platform vendor is treating HTML5 not as a laboratory exercise but as a launch-blocking delivery requirement for paying publishing customers — the clearest sign yet that Flash-less video on a mass-market consumer device is a go-to-market constraint, not a hypothetical.
First-order effects
- Brightcove's publishing customers face maintaining parallel delivery paths — Flash for the existing desktop web and HTML5 for the iPad — or accepting a degraded experience for the device's early buyers on their sites.
- Apple's exclusion of Flash makes the iPad's video catalog dependent on which publishers finish HTML5 conversion before launch, rewarding Brightcove customers who move first.
Second-order effects
- Rival online-video platforms are pressured to match Brightcove's HTML5 conversion capability or risk losing publishers whose audiences will buy the device.
- Flash's position as the default web-video runtime takes its most visible challenge yet, forcing every video vendor's roadmap to answer the compatibility question Brightcove just answered publicly.
Third-order effects
- If a single device maker can reset web-video delivery formats by omission, influence over video standards shifts from standards bodies toward whoever controls distribution hardware.
- Multi-format transcoding and device-aware delivery become core platform capabilities rather than optional features, reshaping where value sits in the online-video toolchain if the pattern holds.
The trend: Device makers, not standards committees, are forcing online video toward HTML5 by deciding which runtimes their hardware will not carry.