The VAR Guy

It’s been almost a year since HTML5 video and related technologies started to become widely available to end-users. Yet many of the grand promises of HTML5 remain elusive, meaning that Adobe Flash retains its dominance, much to the chagrin of my netbook’s CPU. As 2010 draws to a close, then, what can we say about HTML5′s past and its prospects for the future? Read on for some thoughts.

In some respects, 2010 was a good year for HTML5. YouTube announced support for HTML5 videos last January, a move which many other media-rich sites quickly emulated. In addition, with the exception of Internet Explorer, all of the popular Web browsers had implemented support for the <video> tag and other key components of the new HTML format by the middle of this year. (IE 9, currently in beta, will provide HTML5 support.)

The promotion in May 2010 of the WebM codec for HTML5 video encoding, meanwhile, helped to assuage both legal and technical concerns surrounding the adoption of HTML5 video. WebM was particularly good news for the open-source community, which was freed from the threat of having to pay exorbitant licensing fees to enable playback of videos based on the h.264 codec.

And the prolonged mudslinging between Steve Jobs and Adobe this year worked in HTML5′s favor, with Apple promoting the technology as a long-awaited solution to the various inadequacies in Flash.

HTML5 Realities

Despite the string of positive announcements surrounding HTML5 over the last year, however, the extent to which the new technology has actually been deployed on the Web remains limited.

YouTube and many other major media sites continue to offer HTML5 video as an option that users can manually enable, but nowhere is it the default. More tellingly, Hulu, a giant for delivering video to consumers in the United States, offers no HTML5 support at all, apparently still espousing the belief expressed last summer that the format is not sufficient to meet the site’s technical requirements.

This isn’t to say that HTML5 is entirely absent. On the contrary, its presence is readily apparent in certain emerging corners of the Web, although most end-users may not realize it: as Dave Courbanou wrote recently, many of Google’s Chrome’s Web apps actually are HTML5 applications that work in any browser.

But there’s a big difference between Google’s deployment of HTML5 in a roundabout way within a novel niche and the fulfillment of longstanding promises to revolutionize the delivery of media on traditional sites with the new technology. HTML5-based Web apps are nice, but they don’t affect the experience of millions of end-users in the way that a more serious adoption of the protocol by a site like YouTube would.

Maybe this issue matters more to me than to most people because, as an Ubuntu Linux user, I can’t benefit from hardware acceleration in Flash-based videos, which Adobe currently supports only on Windows. Without hardware acceleration, watching a simple embedded video can cripple my CPU; video embedded using HTML5, on the other hand, can be rendered by the GPU and played back much more smoothly.

But even if the performance improvements promised by HTML5 aren’t as dramatic on Windows as they are on other operating systems, it is worth noting, as we prepare to enter 2011, that the way in which HTML5 is actually being used departs in many respects from what most of us expected a year ago. We were promised that one of the new protocol’s chief selling points was the way it would transform the delivery of embedded media, and make Adobe Flash next to obsolete. As it turned out, Flash is far from irrelevant, and HTML5 is proving most important in niches that didn’t really exist 12 months ago.

Sooner or later, I suspect, HTML5 will finally be given preference over Flash by sites like YouTube. And there may even come a day when I no longer have to cut my screen resolution in half to watch full-screen videos smoothly on Hulu. But the <video> tag no longer appears to be the avenue by which HTML5 will penetrate the Web, or even its most important area of development.

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