The point was that, because of Flash, desktop browser vendors will not be deciding whether WebM or H264 will prevail. It’s on devices where Flash is not available (or working poorly) that the vendors will be able to make a difference. No video publisher cares Chrome is now WebM only. If Android is to become WebM only, publishers will start encoding to WebM.

Also, Youtube is not as sticky as a Facebook or Twitter. When Youtube puts in effect changes that will make it less interesting (like not working on mobile devices), people might switch to sites like Facebook and Vimeo for their uploads.

That’s not to say Google is a smart company and Youtube is a huge asset. I’m sure they will find ways to push adoption of WebM, but it won’t be an overnight switch. Let’s first wait and see what happens in the areas of WebM hardware support and Flash VP8 support.

Apple’s HLS is indeed something that works closely with HTML5, but it is not HTML5. It’s only supported on Apple devices. And I’m not aware of any adaptive streaming support in either WinPho7 (they don’t even support a plain tag) or Android 3.0. Do you have links to pages that make these statements?

Also, h.264 can’t become the default HTML5 video codec, anyway, because patent-encumbered technologies aren’t allowed in the standard. At most it can become supported, though not required.

WebM is being proposed as a royaltie-free baseline video codec. My interpretation is that WebM ought to be a fallback codec, so systems that won’t admit h.264 or others because of their license issues (that means all Linuxes, for a start) can play video content, anyway. Given that the h.264 license imposes severe restrictions in distribution, and the conditiions are to change in the future, a by-default royaltie-free codec would be in our best interests. Google is favoring that by converting Youtube’s library to WebM too, and they say they don’t intend to delete their h.264 content at all.

(The interesting thing to see happen would be Adobe integrating WebM in Flash, as they are the ones paying the h.264 royalties Flash video incurs)

Flash is on the way out. In two years it will be a relic.

I have a Flash blocker for Camino, ClicktoFlash for Safari and get an increasing amount of information from Twitter and iOS apps. Most video worth watching is available in an iOS compatible format. Paid premium content can be locked using paid apps, but I don’t pay for video on the internet anyway.

As for Flash based advertising and Flash based website navigation I have just three characters: die

Any site that makes me enable Flash just to view their content is a site that doesn’t want my business. As a consumer my voice is my wallet and I let it speak loud and clear.

h.264 is an efficient format that yields nice looking results. If WebM can deliver the same quality with the same efficiency then it wouldn’t be the end of the world to have a gradual switch. It took years for h.264 to become entrenched so it would take years to switch everyone to WebM. From what I’ve heard, however, WebM yields slightly poorer results so it looks like a backwards step that only benefits Google and Mozilla. Not many backward steps ever succeed.

I think Google can leverage YouTube – Google controls 50% of online video, or more on that alone, and Google could in theory overnight flip a switch and make it all WebM – desktop users would still use Flash so they wouldn’t notice the difference; mobile users would not be able to see it unless they have WebM. There’s plenty of options – a gradual switchover within 2 years for example – would give Google time to do the actual encoding which is no trivial task. And it would put the squeeze on iOS to support WebM.

I am not sure Google is concerned about H.264 patents so much – after all they have plenty of cash to pay any license fees. But I think they might use it to give Android a boost over iOS. If Google aims for Android adoption then they’ll also entice hardware makers to produce hardware decoders for WebM. It’s a bit of a long term play and it will be interesting to see if Google can pull it off – we’re talking 5 years here.

This is a chess game between Google and Apple, with Adobe and Microsoft on the sidelines. I don’t think anyone of these players think about desktops right now – it’s all about mobile: Tablets and phones. That’s where all the potential is, and where all the growth is.