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February 16th_2010 12:03

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YouTube's Legacy

So YouTube is 5 years old. There's an interesting article posted at the Maverick about how YouTube, and by extension Google (it's parent) has shaped the nature of online communication, pushed technology through the need for sheer bandwidth, and will make it fairly easy for Google to force browser makers (and by this we mean Microsoft) to support HTML5 to stream video. If Google decide tomorrow to switch YouTube to display only HTML5 video, it will make any browser that doesn't support it virtually obsolete in many user's eyes, as YT is by far the biggest source for streaming media on the web. Google are famously opposed to supporting proprietary formats such as Quicktime, Realplayer and the various codecs wrapped in Microsoft's WMV, so it's not so far-fetched.

The adoption of HTML5 would also effectively kill one of the primary uses for Flash - streaming video in the browser.

http://tinyurl.com/yg7qkvx