Disney Hates On HTML5
Disney-ABC EVP Albert Cheng told a crowd at the Appnation conference today that HTML5 is “not ready” for ABC. — He gave two reasons: — No room for ads. Without the ability to insert ads, Disney-ABC has little interest in moving towards HTML5.
Context & Ripple Effects
Disney-ABC's stance lands in the middle of a year-long fight over web video. Since May 2010, HTML5 adoption has been gaining steam largely because of Apple's push against Adobe Flash, and by September the HTML5 <video> tag was being pitched to developers as a plugin-free alternative to Silverlight-style players.
Against that backdrop, Disney-ABC EVP Albert Cheng told the Appnation conference that HTML5 is 'not ready' for ABC — though that framing was disputed — while the confirmed objection on record is narrower: HTML5 offers no way to insert ads, and without ads Disney-ABC has little interest in moving. Staying put also means staying on Flash, whose cookie-storage practices had already drawn a 'zombie cookie' privacy lawsuit in July 2010 and placed ABC among the sites sued under federal computer-intrusion law.
First-order effects
- ABC's full-episode streaming stays on its existing plugin-based player for now, keeping pre-roll ad insertion intact for the advertisers who fund free network video on the web.
- Cheng hands other broadcasters a ready-made talking point — no ad support, no migration — just as Apple's anti-Flash campaign pressures every network with an iPhone-and-iPad audience.
Second-order effects
- Adobe becomes the accidental beneficiary: every network that defers HTML5 on advertising grounds extends Flash's life in premium web video, even as Flash faces fresh security warnings and privacy litigation around its storage mechanisms.
- The burden shifts to the standards community and ad-tech vendors — until HTML5 gains a workable ad-insertion story, rivals like NBC and Hulu face the same trade-off between open-web delivery and monetization.
Third-order effects
- If ad standards lag while device makers keep squeezing plugins, network television drifts from the open web toward native apps and platform-controlled distribution — trading Flash dependency for dependence on Apple and other app-store gatekeepers.
- A pattern in which media companies publicly veto open standards over monetization gaps invites regulators and advertisers alike to treat ad-format compatibility as infrastructure rather than a per-network engineering choice.
The trend: Broadcast networks' move to HTML5 video is being paced not by browser capability but by when open-standard ad insertion catches up to what plugin-based players already monetize.