Adobe announces the HTML5 Video Player widget
HTML5 has received a tremendous amount of buzz, much of it driven by the potential for plugin-free video. However, the limited browser support for the HTML5 <video> tag has forced web designers to scramble for a solution that would work across platforms as well as browsers.
Context & Ripple Effects
Plugin-free video has been the loudest promise around HTML5 video all year: Microsoft's IE team weighed in from the browser side in April 2010, Google Reader adopted HTML5 rendering in May, and Brightcove mapped out the future of HTML5 video experiences back in March. But patchy browser and codec support has left designers without a reliable way to ship it.
That gap is what makes Adobe's move notable rather than defensive posturing alone. The company built its web-video franchise on Flash — extending it with H.264 support back in 2007 — so shipping an HTML5 Video Player widget inside Dreamweaver means Adobe is now selling tools for both the plugin and plugin-free paths at once, while confirmed reports of Flash struggling on Android devices add urgency to the hedge.
First-order effects
- Web designers working in Dreamweaver get a one-step way to generate cross-browser video markup, sidestepping the manual fallback coding the fragmented <video> tag otherwise demands.
Second-order effects
- Other site-building and CMS vendors face pressure to match the widget-or-worse dynamic, while video platform players like Brightcove — already publishing HTML5 roadmaps — gain a wider authoring ecosystem to plug into.
Third-order effects
- If authoring tools keep abstracting the plugin-versus-standards choice away from designers, playback format stops being a designer decision at all — quietly eroding the lock-in that made Flash the default for web video since the mid-2000s.
The trend: Web video is transitioning from plugin-based playback to standards-based HTML5 delivery, and toolmakers are building compatibility bridges that decide how fast designers can make the switch.