The good news should be, everyone with a major stake in the outcome of the Web video standards debate has now publicly expressed support for something called “open” or “openness.” But that’s where the similarities, and even the niceness, end. Yesterday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs personally weighed in on the subject by making it an “us against them” battle, with Adobe and Flash the villains.
Late yesterday, the head of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 project, Dean Hachamovitch, followed suit, representing the company whose decisions about what standards to support — or not support — have historically steered the course of Web development, for better or worse. Assuming a far more civil tone than Jobs, but with a message no less significant, Hachamovitch solidified Microsoft’s stance on high-definition Web video standards by announcing that IE9 would support H.264 for HTML 5 built-in video…and only H.264.
“H.264 is an industry standard, with broad and strong hardware support,” Hachamovitch wrote. “Because of this standardization, you can easily take what you record on a typical consumer video camera, put it on the Web, and have it play in a Web browser on any operating system or device with H.264 support (e.g., a PC with Windows 7). Recently, we publicly showed IE9 playing H.264-encoded video from YouTube…For all these reasons, we’re focusing our HTML 5 video support on H.264.”
The original reason for the creation of the
