Beginning HTML5 Media: Make the most of the new video and audio standards for the Web

Abstract

When it comes to the Internet, the pace of change can be both breathtaking and overwhelming. This is especially true when it comes to the subject of this book.In 2003, Tom was in Seattle getting ready to do a presentation on Flash Video at Digital Design World when Jim Heid, the Conference Organizer, saw the title slide of the presentation and mentioned that he might be facing a rather tough crowd. Tom looked out over the audience, sized them up, and told Jim he had his back covered. Jim said he wasn’t too sure about that and pointed at the title on Tom’s screen: “QuickTime is dead.” Looking out into the darkened room, Tom watched about 400 people in the audience open their Powerbooks, hundreds of bright white Apple logos staring back at him. It was indeed going to be a tough crowd.Nobody really expected the stranglehold that Apple, Microsoft, and Real had on the web streaming market in 2003 to be broken. Yet by Spring 2005, just 18 months after that presentation, that is exactly what had happened. Those three web video delivery technologies practically vanished, replaced almost entirely by Flash Video. This is not to say QuickTime and Windows Media were dead technologies. But when it came to putting video on the Web, the Flash Player, thanks, in part, to YouTube, had become the only game in town.Two years later when the iPhone arrived, Flash as a video delivery platform, lost its stranglehold on video and audio content delivery. In fact Flash essentially disappeared in 2011 when Apple banned Flash from its devices. It was at that point the market changed its focus to HTML 5 encoding and playback solutions. With a single standard that was “ubiquitous” one would think the dust had settled. Not quite