Within two years, the number of hours people spend viewing online video will easily surpass the time they spend watching television. There’s no doubt that online video has enjoyed stratospheric growth of late, but despite that success, the technical underpinning by which video is delivered into your browser hasn’t really developed much since the 1990s. Back then, watching a video on the Web meant squinting at a postage stamp-sized low-res player with very jerky video. Sponsor Nick Wilson is CTO at Break Media , an entertainment community for men. He’s spent the last two decades building products that leverage digital content and is a recognized innovator in the digital entertainment field. He’s excited about Break.com being one of the first HTML5-enabled video sites. Fast forward ahead to 2004, when YouTube and casual gaming sites burst onto the scene and we finally had killer applications that meant one thing: To experience the new wonders of the Web, one had no choice but to download Adobe’s Flash browser plugin. After all, the two most popular browsers, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (collectively with 80% market share), still have no native way to play a video or animation without installing Flash. So the massive demand for video on the Web was enabled by a few de-facto standards that converged at just the right time, and was led by Adobe Flash, which is now installed on over 98% of all desktops and laptops. The trouble is that we engineers always viewed Flash as a transitionary technology: a platform that enabled a browser to do things that couldn’t be done using the archaic Internet standards of HTML and JavaScript alone. Every transitionary technology reaches a peak (98% adoption is a pretty good peak!) and eventually declines as newer developer-friendly technologies with better standards compliance take hold. Of course, with Flash being so ubiquitous on desktops and laptops it will be years before developers ditch it all together. But the desktop isn’t where the next battle for video will be fought – rather it will be the new breed of platform and mobile devices like smartphones, tablets and set-top boxes – all of which have limited processing power and little to no ability for a user to download and install plugins like Flash. With the newest crop of browsers, principally Apple Safari and Google Chrome (soon to be joined by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9), come a new set of capabilities based upon existing standards: HTML, JavaScript, and H.264 video playback. Using this trinity of technologies, it’s possible to engineer a completely immersive video playback experience that’s indistinguishable from a Flash-based player to the user, but is far faster and easier to develop and is supported out of the box within the browser. The arrival of the iPad unquestionably puts the fate of online video – and the means by which it is distributed – center-stage. It’s unsurprising that Apple’s newest baby, the iPad, would follow in the footsteps of its older sibling, the iPhone, by relying on the browser to handle video rather than allowing a Flash plugin. But there’s one critical difference: The iPad allows an embedded video playback experience, so the video can appear within a normal Web page without having to go full-screen as with the iPhone. This seemingly minor difference, coupled with Safari’s mature HTML5 implementation, means that a website can be modified to work on the iPad and can retain all of the functionality of a Flash-based player but with a developer-friendly HTML and JavaScript implementation. Provided that your videos are already encoded in H.264, modifying a video playback page to be iPad-compatible should not take more than a day or so (see the iPad screenshot above). Adding some iPad-specific features such as pinch-to-zoom with auto page rearrangement (impossible to do in Flash) take longer, but are still very straightforward to implement. And what about the online video economy, with its Flash-based pre-roll videos and overlay advertising units? Well, with some clever coding they can work just fine on the iPad, too. Transcoding video ads into H.264 is a straightforward process, and ad units such as a “video bug” (those pop-up messages that show at the bottom of a video) can easily be reprogrammed to work in HTML5. When we combine the in-video units like preroll and video bug along with non-Flash IAB-standard ad units, there are plenty of opportunities to monetize a video view impression. So the iPad without Flash, rather than presenting a problem for online video, presents a great opportunity to modernize the video playback experience, supporting the unique and immersive user experience that the iPhone started and the iPad will continue and enhance. Discuss

Click here to read more

HTML5 is quickly becoming an important part of the Web surfing experience, and according to online ad network Chitika , almost half of all Internet users are already using HTML5-compatible browsers. On Chitika’s network, Firefox (version 3.5 and higher) is the most popular of these HTML5-compatible browsers, followed by Chrome and Safari, with Opera coming in a distant fourth in this race. The league of HTML5-incompatible browsers is mostly comprised of different versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Sponsor Firefox 3.5+ makes up almost half of all HTML5-compatible traffic to Chitika’s networks, while Internet Explorer 8 accounts for half of all HTML5-incompatible traffic. To determine a browser’s HTML5 readiness, Chitika looked at the browser’s ability to render HTML5 video . Given that the HTML5 vs. Flash debate has gotten a lot of attention lately – thanks, in no small part to Steve Jobs’ declaration of war against Flash – it is good to see that so many users are already using HTML5-compatible browsers. While the market share for Internet Explorer continues to drop, Microsoft’s browser still accounts for about half of all Internet traffic . The next version of Internet Explorer will support HTML5, but given that Internet Explorer users are rather slow at updating their browsers , it will likely be a while before all of Microsoft’s users will run compatible browsers. In this context, it is worth pointing out that – according to Adobe’s own data – Flash still holds a strong lead over HTML5, as it is installed on 99% of all Internet-enabled desktops. Flash Player 10, the latest version of Adobe’s Flash plugin, is now installed on 97% of all Internet-enabled computers in the U.S. and Canada. It is also worth noting that Google is one of the strongest backers of HTML5, but at the same time, the company also plans to ship Flash with every version of Chrome soon. According to Google, this is meant to ensure the best possible browsing experience for Chrome users. Image credit: Flickr user squidish. Discuss

Click here to read more

We have to say, you know the end is near when entire countries advise its citizens to move on, but the final kicker comes when Google says that after this date, it will no longer support the browser that’s been with us for nearly a decade. Google-owned YouTube will end support for Internet Explorer 6 on March 13, just two weeks after ending support on Google Docs. We suspect that YouTube will affect a larger portion of IE6 users and may be a final tipping point. Sponsor Internet Explorer 6 was first released in August, 2001 and has since come pre-installed with Windows XP, which still accounted for over 60% of browsers world-wide in December of last year. Ars Technica explains that Microsoft refuses to force its users to upgrade, even tho it “has stated time and time again that it wants to see IE6 disappear as much as anyone else”. Currently, IE6 accounts for about 20% of surfers worldwide, with IE8 currently the most popular version. According to Google , users running IE6 and other old browsers will still be able to watch videos, but will be shown an interstitial, as seen above, to remind them to upgrade every two weeks. Some features will not be available to these users until they upgrade. Google considers old browsers to be anything older than IE7, Firefox 3.0, Chrome 4.0 and Safari 3.0. In other news, we can only hope that this is a signal that we will be seeing some cool new features rolling out in the near future for YouTube. And perhaps more companies will come out against the now-ancient browser and help to put it out of it’s, and web designers’ everywhere, misery. Discuss

Click here to read more