Archive for May, 2010

I just wanted to make a small announcement: Just a minute ago at the Brightcove Monetisation Summit in London, our friend Cameron Church over at Brightcove demonstrated the easiness of publishing to different devices using Brightcove. One device that was especially exiting was the iPad – Cameron live demoed how their device recognition automatically switched from Flash to an HTML5 player when loaded on an iPad, and moreover – the content was monetised by our fresh new Monetizer AdPlayer for HTML5!

Videoplaza's Monetizer AdPlayer for HTML5 live on the iPad from Videoplaza Crew on Vimeo.

What is this HTML5 all about?

If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s the next generation of the HTML language that is underlying all of the web. And the reason for why everybody in this business is excited is that HTML5 (unlike previous versions) has built-in support for video, meaning that we can finally stream video in regular web browsers without having to rely on 3rd party technologies like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight.

This last piece has been made extra important by Apple who seems to have a beef going on with Adobe, and has decided against allowing Flash to run on iPhone and iPad. This means that HTML5 is the way to go if you want to stream video in Safari on these platforms.

Since Videoplaza has just one sole reason of existence – to make online video profitable – obviously we’re excited about HTML5 too. It’s not only that it gives us the tools we need to monetise content on iPhones and iPads — HTML5 will truly be a leap forward on all platforms once the technology has matured a bit, browsers supporting it have reached a big enough install base and the mainstream services perform a switch.

Introducing Monetizer AdPlayer for HTML5

We always do everything we can to enable publishers to monetise their video content regardless of platform and that means that HTML5 is a logical next step.

This is why we’re introducing the HTML5 version of our Monetizer AdPlayer today.

Once again the benefits of the plugin architecture we pioneered with the Flash version of our Monetizer AdPlayer shines. It’s completely compatible with the HTML5 way of doing things, means that we can pre-integrate ourselves in platforms like Brightcove and most important: take care of all the challenges that surrounds in-stream advertising.

Challenges ahead

It’s going to be really interesting to follow the pace of HTML5 adoption. The standard is not finalized yet, and the technology is obviously in it’s infancy. There’s an underlying conflict going on about which video codec that should be used (H.264, Ogg Theora or WebM).

Further, HTML5 is also suffering from the same problem that a couple of years ago was partly responsible for holding Flash back: lack of support for DRM.

While Flash ultimately overcame this and became the de-facto standard it is today, it could probably have turned out completely different if services like Youtube, Sky [UK] and M6 [FR] would have picked another technology. In the same way, HTML5 is probably going to need some high profile evangelists and migrations of major services in order to become mainstream and get content owners across the globe to recognize the standard and allow their content to be streamed in this way.

But then again, speaking of evangelists, Steve Jobs and Apple has already made a good start driving HTML5 adoption. And he’s not alone.