Digital Media: The Unfulfilled Promise of HTML 5 Video

HTML 5 is widely regarded as the holy-grail of internet video, or at least it’s supposed to be. It allows web-enabled devices (Smart TVs, video game consoles, phones, tablets, PCs. etc) to play video hosted on the internet right from the web browser with the need for any additional software i.e – plugins.  The framework for HTML 5 video was first drafted in 2007 and five years later, it is gathering steam. It hasn’t reached critical mass but it is flourishing. So just what has hampered this wonderful technology from being the massive success it was heralded to be? To understand this, we must consider how we got here in the first place.

Before the advent of HTML 5, web browsers could not just play videos without the aid of third party software (plugins). And back then when plugins were required, the de facto standard was Macromedia’s Flash format (now owned by Adobe). All a user needed to do was to download and install the flash plugin (a one-time process for each and every format).  Even, Youtube implemented its video delivery system using flash. Flash wasn’t without its drawbacks, chief among which were high memory usage and security flaws. Other companies, including Microsoft introduced alternate formats. Microsoft’s was Silverlight. But Silverlight and the others failed to catch on mostly because they were just another plugin and so most web developers stuck with flash. Things worked this way for a while until a certain Steve Jobs condemned Adobe’s flash format and defended Apple’s decision not to include flash on iOS devices. The iPhone and iPad didn’t support flash and wanted its users to enjoy web video. They were able to convince Youtube to re-encode most of the videos hosted on its site in the H264 format and deliver them via the emerging HTML 5 specification that allowed browsers to play videos without the need for plugins. The problem here was the HTML 5 specification did not specify any one format as the one which all browsers must support.

The bodies in charge of web standards, the HTML Working Group and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) stated that the desired format for HTML 5 video should be royalty free, have good compression, be open source and have a hardware decoder. And for a short while the Ogg Theora format (.ogg) was recommended as the chosen format in the HTML 5 draft because it met all these requirements. But Apple opposed this format on the ground that some browsers might support other formats in a better way. And so the Ogg format was removed from the specification. Presently, the specification states that no known codec meets all four of its desired requirements. Consequently, three formats have emerged as the format for HTML 5 video but none of the major browsers natively support all three. Native support for the three formats is as follows:

H264: Supported by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari

Ogg: Supported by Opera Browser and Mozilla’s Firefox

WebM: Supported by Google’s Chrome & Chromium, Opera and Mozilla

So any person desirous of using HTML 5 to deliver his video must encode the video in the three aforementioned formats and upload all three. The reason for this is that none of the major browsers natively support all three and a visitor to your site could be using any of these browsers.

And that’s the state of things today. Not much has changed from the days of flash. There is still no universal format and there are even more copies (formats) of the same video. A rather un-green solution as more energy is expended to encode and upload each of the three formats and more storage space on web servers is consequently being used up. And despite all its shortcomings, flash itself has endured mostly because of the time consuming alternative of encoding and uploading the same video in three different formats. A very annoying prospect for people who wish to upload a fairly lengthy video on a slow internet connection.

And so, instead of solving a problem, HTML 5 video has compounded the problem mostly because the major players refuse to agree.

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