With a Big Push From Apple, HTML5 Video Wins the Web (But Not Completely)
Remember the big Apple vs. everyone else video-format war from last spring? When Apple was pushing the HTML5 standard it wanted to use for video on the iPhone and iPad, instead of Adobe's Flash?
Context & Ripple Effects
The format fight that opened in spring 2010 — Apple backing HTML5 video on iPhone and iPad against Adobe's Flash — is being called for HTML5, though with the caveat that it hasn't won everywhere. The arc ran through Microsoft weighing in on HTML5 video from the IE team in April and Brightcove mapping out HTML5 video experiences back in March, as the web-video ecosystem lined up behind the standard Apple's devices forced onto publishers.
The telling detail is Adobe's own posture six months in: just days before this piece, its Dreamweaver team shipped an HTML5 Video Player widget, meaning the company whose format was under siege is now selling tooling for the challenger. When the besieged vendor starts building for the rival standard, the war's outcome is effectively priced in.
First-order effects
- Video publishers serving iPhone and iPad traffic now maintain dual pipelines — H.264 in HTML5 for Apple's devices, Flash fallback for the rest of the desktop web — doubling their encoding and player-maintenance work.
- Adobe is split into two strategies at once: defending Flash on the desktop while shipping HTML5 authoring tools like the new Dreamweaver widget, so its developer base doesn't migrate to competitors' HTML5 toolchains.
Second-order effects
- Browser and device makers who sat out the spring skirmish now have cover to prioritize HTML5 video support, since Apple's device volume has made it the de facto requirement for reaching mobile viewers.
- Player and encoding vendors such as Brightcove gain a market where HTML5 competence is the differentiator, shifting revenue toward platforms that abstract the dual-format complexity away from publishers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, web standards get set by dominant hardware makers rather than browser vendors or standards bodies first — a structural inversion where what ships on the iPhone and iPad defines what the web supports, with Flash relegated to a legacy desktop runtime.
The trend: Mobile device makers, led by Apple's iPhone and iPad, are displacing browser vendors as the force that decides which web technologies win, pulling video from Flash toward open HTML5 standards.