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Technology: What Will Be the Successor to Flash?
Web browsers aren’t very good at handling video, if they can handle it all. Enter the plugin. The major Web browsers have been architected to be flexible, enabling developers to extend basic browser functionality by way of creating plug-ins. The Flash plug-in kick-started the on-line video phenomena — without it there may not have been YouTube and the tens and hundreds of web sites based on Flash video technology.
Technologists are working now to create the next generation of web video technology. Adobe is working to improve Flash, but the popularity of on-line video has sparked the development of a number of other video technologies. Today almost all video viewed on the internet remains in Flash, but it isn’t clear how long that dominance will last. Many technologists say that an alternative open technology, not dominated by a single vendor, would be more healthy for the whole industry.
In 2004, the standards body that defines the base capabilities of what browsers can do decided to include video as part of their specification. This latest version, an extension to the core HTML browser technology, is called HTML5. But HTML5 doesn’t specify the exact format that video should be encoded in. And that has led to competing implementations in the industry.
Right now there are two main HTML5 video encoding technologies that have received wide backing. H.264 is being used by Microsoft in the IE browser and also by Apple in their Safari browser, while the technology known as WebM is being used by Google and FireFox. The new format, whichever wins, will likely be used in almost all devices, ranging from standard PCs to mobile devices and even televisions.
Publishers are not currently happy with the split. While they still rely on primarily using Flash today, the future is less certain, and the cost involved with having to encode their content in multiple formats are something that they don’t want to have to deal with.
Google recently upped the stakes by saying that Chrome will not support H.264 — they had promised equal support for both of the formats.
