Steve Jobs’ wishes may well be coming true, with Adobe losing the battle to keep Flash as the Web video format of choice. And OGG Theora’s hopes of becoming the standard may also be fading. All due to the increasing use of the H.264 standard.
Web Video Formats
There are a number of Web video formats around at the current time. Adobe Flash has been the standard for a number of years, but OGG Theora and H.264 have both emerged more recently as viable alternatives.
H.264 is the favorite of many big companies, including Apple and Microsoft. The latter of which recently announced that it’ll be the only video format supported by Internet Explorer 9. Which, as IE is still the most popular Web browser, is big news.
Apple Hates Flash
Apple hates Flash, and has for a while. Although it’s supported on Mac, none of Apple’s mobile devices, the iPhone, iPod Touch, and most recently the iPad, use Flash at all.
After being criticized for this in recent months, Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently spoke out about Flash in a long blog post, explaining Apple’s stance on the issue.
Jobs gave a full list of solid reasons why Flash basically needs to die and be replaced by H.264, including reliability, security, and performance issues, how it drains batteries quickly, and how it isn’t suited to the increasingly-popular touchscreens.
H.264 On The Rise
Jobs’ wish to see Flash die may already be coming true, at least according to Encoding.com. The company’s president Jeff Malkin told TechCrunch that H.264 has risen massively in popularity recently, mainly at the expense of Flash.
H.264 has risen from accounting for 31 percent of all videos in Q2, 2009 to 66 percent of all videos in Q2, 2010. In the same time period, Flash has dropped from 69 percent to 26 percent.
Malkin claims this is representative of the Web as a whole.
Conclusions
Is H.264 destined to be the next Web standard, at least until the next format comes along? If these figures are accurate and representative of the Web as a whole then it would appear so. Which is going to make Steve Jobs’ day, or possibly whole year.
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