Web Video Predictions, iPad, Flash, and HTML5

In the most recent issue of DV Magazine, the cover story is a short, two page, web video state-of-the-union by James Careless. Andrew Maisner is quoted as saying,

'choice is in.' By this I mean that we will gradually change to a universe where we can view whatever we want, whenever we want, with or without commercials, via micro payment. For example, in the future, I will 'tune' in to watch the Lakers play. Before the images appear, I will be given a choice of seeing the game free with commercials or having my credit card debited 50 cents and seeing it without commercials.

Mr. Careless goes on to interview those who see a growing need for more and more web video from many kinds of businesses, but at the same time a need for education because web video standards are all over the place. Mr. Careless points out that there seems to be an unwillingness to push HD down narrow broadband pipes that are happily monetizing SD content at the moment. And finally he gives us a cursory look ahead to clickable hot spot events and better synchronization between embedded video and surrounding webpage elements. (Anybody remember EditDV by Radius? We could program hot spots into QT very easily back then!) Reading the magazine cover had made me flip right to this article, but after reading it I felt there must be something more to say about the future of web video...

While I was reading Mr. Careless' overview I found myself thinking what it would be like to read DV Mag on an iPad, just unveiled by Apple. The fact of the matter is that DV Mag is presented in Flash and the iPad, like the iPhone before it, won't be handling Adobe Flash. So what will online magazines do? Will they go the way of the NY Times (interestingly failing to mention that they themselves were part of the keynote demo!) and redesign themselves to take advantage of the iPad or will the NewBay Media's of the world ignore it? Apple seems to have something against Flash even though Flash drives the majority of video on the web. Flash is a cpu hog and may shorten web viewing on battery operated mobile devices, but isn't its exclusion market suicide? Apparently not for iPhone sales and by extension Apple is figuring it will not be a barrier to iPad sales either.

YouTube plays as H.264 on an iPhone and therefore just as well on an iPad, but down the road it's possible that HTML5 will wipe away the plug-in wars altogether because audio and video will be part of the specification, the core language of the web. Here is some more about it.

In Conclusion:
Watching 720p video on an iPad is where mobile web video is at right now. If you think you can get away with capturing and outputting marginal video because your final destination is the web or small mobile devices, think again... because the bar just went up!