Open Video, Firefox, HTML 5 and The Future of Everything

For years the options for playing a video or audio in a Web page (well, the decent options) were limited: download a plug-in for Adobe Flash or Apple QuickTime, or don’t watch/listen at all.  Use tools provided by a couple of corporate giants or don’t play.  Want to walk a different path than one laid out by these giants of industry?  Sorry,  the giants know what’s best for you … or at least that’s what they say.

Now,  finally,  in an time when half the silly links your friends are sending you are to gems such as videos of guys getting hit in the groin,  a new option is emerging.

To be fair, there are a couple of other alternatives.  RealPlayer was in the mix for a while,  but was widely known for being an obnoxious piece of software that nobody really wanted on their computer,  and,  although it’s still around, it’s fallen from favor and is far from the top of the online video player plug-in list.  More recently,  one of the software world’s great titans,  Microsoft,  has gotten a bit of traction promoting its Silverlight technology, which was built as a head-on competitor to Adobe’s Flash.

Notice a common theme?  If you said,  “Each one of these options is being offered by an entity with revenues that rival the GDPs of most small island nations” , then we’re on the same page.  If you also wondered if their motives are altruistic or born of self-interest, then not only are we on the same page, we’re on the same paragraph.  Luckily, we don’t even have to feel funny about our cynical musings,  because we’re in good company … quite a few distinguished members of the open source community,  savior of all that is good on the Internet,  have been thinking along the same lines.

If you’re a Firefox user and you’ve recently upgraded your browser, you may have noticed a note on the “what’s new” page stating that your sexy, newly updated browser supports “open video formats.”  This is code for “now people can build web pages for you that contain video,  require no plugins,  don’t require the web page creator to pay for special software to encode the video, and can be put up with way less effort than the proprietary stuff.”

All this bodes well not only for our penchant for guy-getting-kicked-in-the-groin videos, and for Web innovation in general.  Bold claims?  Here are some points you should know about “how”, “why” and “who” that,  I hope, will convince you:

• Open Source Innovation:  The video format being supported when most people talk about “open video” goes by the curious name of Ogg. I know,  it sounds like what a couple of nice cave people might name their first child,  but the technology is quite the opposite of pre-historic.  The video and audio “layers” that can tag along with the Ogg file format (called Theora and Vorbis,  respectively … props to the folks naming this stuff!) are,  along with Ogg itself,  are all completely open.  Patent-free,  royalty free,  and open to anybody who wants to see or even contribute to the guts under the hood.  Once adopted by many contributors,  as Ogg has been,  this sort of openness leads to rapid innovation.  Case in point: Ogg used to be slower/bigger than the proprietary formats that dominated the online video world,  but now, thanks to developer contributions,  it’s at least as fast/small as the closed formats,  if not a tad better in both areas.
• Big Support From Big Players. Not everybody is lining up to support this particular open standard.  Namely, Microsoft and Adobe are not especially eager to promote a technology that could eat their proverbial lunches by squashing their competing technologies (Silverlight and Flash).  But, Google, Firefox, Opera and even Apple (in Safari) are getting behind open video with Ogg.   Every organization on that list is interesting, but can you guess which one of them wins the “wow, that’s going to really make a difference” category?  Here’s a hint: it’s the same company that owns YouTube, the world’s most popular online video website … Google.  If they stay committed (and it looks like they will) then there’s a good Ogg will take hold.
• Tagging Along With the Next Big Thing.  Open Web video standards are closely associated with the still-being-hatched standard called HTML 5.  Pretty boring acronym for the technology being described as “the biggest leap forward in web standards in almost a decade.”  This is the real deal … older HTML spec advances have made the Web a better place to publish content, but this one aims to turn your Web browser into a full fledged application platform,  as good as your desktop,  with full-fledged,  standardized,  tricked out video, audio,  interactivity,  animations.  In other words,  real applications in your browser … and guess who is, once again, throwing their momentous weight behind it?  Google has already done a fine job of building a suite of fine web-based applications,  and has been pushing the idea of Web-as-a-real-application-platform for a while now.  And video is an integral part of that platform.

Those are some random thoughts on the topic (ok, maybe part of the title reading “the Future of Everything” was somewhat exaggerated),  and,  as always,  I’d love to hear more thoughts on the trend from anybody who’s inclined to comment.