A Primer on HTML5 Video and Why You Should Care About It

"There is good news: the "open Web", a vision for the future of the Internet that is participatory, collaborative and free from vendor lock-in is finally coming to fruition. Following Mozilla Firefox's successful introduction of open Web standards into their browser platform and the rapid adoption of Android on mobile phone, today we see many browser vendors and Web-enabled device manufacturers gravitating toward supporting vendor-neutral platforms for rich-media Web experiences. Only a few years ago, it seemed unlikely that tech giants (such as Google, Apple and Microsoft) and nonprofits (such as Mozilla) could agree on something so contentious as future standards for the Web. But because of the fragmented market across devices and the increasingly fragmented browser market on desktop computers, browser vendors and device makers are forced to move forward together or fall behind.

"There is bad news too. The vision of "write once publish anywhere" is far from reality. Like many contentious agreements, the devil is in the details, and there are a lot of details. The open future of media on the Web is far from guaranteed. In this article, I highlight how the industry is transitioning away from targeting a single vendor for rich-media Web experiences to targeting multiple rich-media Web browsers instead. In this environment, middle-layer solutions will bridge the small differences between implementations."

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