Reiki Music. Video Marketing

HV5 the new old news in web video

Lots of people jumping on the HTML 5 video band wagon, so let’s just clarify a few things, as I see them.

Will HTML 5 video, let’s nickname that bull frog to HV5 shall we?!

Will HV5 make me money this month? No!

Will HV5 kill Flash over night? I doubt Adobe would be happy about that so NO. More importantly, Flash has about 85% penetration in the market place (sorry Linux owners if you are having problems..)

Sorry iPhone users if you can’t play Flash stuff on your 3 inch screens while you’re on the toilet, or driving your car. What? Is that safe?

What penetration will HV5 have in July 2009? I’m guessing about 15%. Sure it will nuke, but who wants to develop content for an audience only 60% can actually see?

HV5 seems to be based on Ogg open format. OGG are very nice people, but Ogg for audio hardly dented the MP3 codec, which is also licensed like Flash Video. How many people have Ogg sound files on their iPods? Not that many I suggest.

See any similarities here for the future of Ogg video?

NOW if the porn industry start adopting Ogg Video, sorry HV5, then the table may turn.

But why would they? What advantage does it have?

They already have mass capacity Flash video streaming servers in place. Why should they change? Many publishers still prefer streaming friendly Quicktime video, or other formats that they can ADD “DRM” (digital rights managements) to. Are they going to switch to a non protected open standard?

What does HV5 offer that Flash and Flash video does not? Other than it is an “open” standard?

WHO wants video to be an “open” standard? Well any one who does not control the existing closed one.

Who would that be then? Google and YouTube? Interesting!!

What is Google’s history of doing this?

Let’s consider Google’s Open Social.

They conned, sorry suggested that, Facebook and MySpace, et al, the 2 BIGGEST players in social, when Google was not, might like to USE “Googles” open standard so everyone could share address book friends easily between systems.

COOL!

Who benefited most from that deal? Who WILL benefit most from that deal?

We’d all like to say “the users” right?

Well lets fast forward in time to when Google have added their personal Digg style social ranking to “their” organic search results. Now lets add the open social address book to that equation.

What happens now?

Google have “access” to the biggest social address book in the world, and have integrated it in to organic search, which they control 65% of, OVERNIGHT without having to become big in social themselves. Can you even remember the name of Google’s own social platform? Heard of open social though, haven’t you…

See a good idea for Google in here yet?

What will Microsoft and Yahoo and thousands of other players do about an open video standard?

Well Microsoft has Silverlight, which Channel 4 Television uses on its TV web portal. And they’ve just announced last week that they will have open archives for everything except (copyright complicated) USA content.

Will they switch to HV5? We’ll have to wait and see.

Is HV5 a good thing?

Sure why not. Open standards help to cement commercial ones. Yep think about that one!

Will it take over the world overnight? No and no again.

We’ll end up with multiple standards for a VERY long time.

Adobe will not sit on their laurels. They pretty much own the content creation market between Flash, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Air, Premiere, After Effects, FLEX, and their new standard in easy GUI, I forget the name off hand, but it’s pretty cool and it’s something like Flash Flex. It’s 5am!!!! I don’t honestly remember. It basically lets a graphic designer make the start of a truly interactive and DYNAMIC application, straight from Photoshop. Now that IS pretty cool when you think about it. Who makes that again? Oh yeah ADOBE!

As a publisher, will I convert all my content to HV5? Very VERY slowly.

Will I stop producing Flash and Quicktime video. No way. Why would I lose 85% player penetration for some new fangled, not fully ratified standard?

When HV5 does something “COMPELLING” beyond Flash video, then I will change my tune.

Flash Video is dead? Do you really think so? I don’t.

Like all new “standards” there is a LONG WAIT between the “theory” and the global adoption.

See how many OGG audio files you can play me, and then how many MP3s you can play instead.
OGG audio is better in most ways. Why hasn’t it caught up yet?

Well that’s the strange thing about “standards”, even open ones that have no funding and no commercial leadership.

Oh and you can control HV5 with Javascript? COOL! What about the 8% of people who surf with Javascript turned off?

Aren’t “standards” wonderful !

Yes easier and more common video tagging would be great. So would MORE ACCURATE video tagging vs the keyword stuffing we are going to see from black hat peddlers. But it is already pretty easy to properly tag a video using html code. Flash even has a field for it when you hit publish!!!!! But it’s called a page title and a caption (heading) on the page the video is on. That’s a pretty big clue. Even one a search engine can pick up on! DOH! Sure we could all agree on a new meta tag to add to video. How hard would that be?

They don’t have to go in the head as far as I’m concerned and we could agree that there could be more than one per page. Why limit to 256 characters either? But these are just details. Obviously W3C did not see this as a particular problem yet.
But a new html TAG seems a bit more “sensible” than trusting on a whole new level of HTML.

I’m not sure why everyone is so quick to trash Adobe Flash either, other than to be “topical” (sic). Adobe have been pretty good to the industry, apparently providing a way that regular people could add streaming video to their sites, using pretty small file sizes or video. If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be so many Flash video files out there and Quicktime (or God forbid Real Video) would still be on everyones lips, other than mine.

Erm congrats to every one who has jumped on the HV5 band wagon. That will help it become a seamless standard – not

HV5. At least I was first to christen it with an easy to type name

Of course what will probably really happen, is some underground format like “Divx HD” will wake up and produce an easy to publish system. It’s not totally accurate to say DIVX is a jiggle of Mpeg 4, but whatever it is, it exists and it does VERY well at file sizes.

If the promise of MPEG 5 (interactivity) has surfaced the way it was supposed to, 8 years ago or more now, then the video world would be a very different place today. And with a DIVX version of MPEG 5…

WOW now that would be something worth blogging about.

Meantime, until OGG on “DVD” and OGG supporting DVD players become “common place” I’m quite happy to play luddite with HV5 for a little longer.

I forget which law it is, but the one about a new standard needs to be TWICE as powerful and just as friendly and TWICE as easy to use, before it can even hope to become the new norm. I don’t see much of that happening in HV5, “yet”. Do you?

OK so Google may switch to HV5 on Youtube. OK great. Now what? What difference does it make to any one except YouTube? OK so “maybe” “most” people upgrade to a HV5 compatible browser like Firefox (3.5+) or BANG “Google Chrome” (BANG), so they can watch drunk girls wee’ing in the street, then what? HV5 support on Google mobile phones using Google A????. (BANG).

Maybe the Apple iPhone will support HV5. Maybe Apple will make Quicktime (the own) support HV5. May be HV5 iPod version 8 will blitz the Christmas 2009 market. May be…

ut even still, we end up with exactly what I said. Multiple formats for a very long time. Flash video is not going to dissapear over night.
Adobe are not going to go “oh well then”.

How much do you want to bet that Adobe CS5 Dreamweaver will add HV5 support?
How much do yo want to bet that Adobe CS5 Flash will export HV5 format?
How much do yo want to bet that Adobe CS5 Flex/Air will integrate HV5 format?

Yep. Adobe control the content creation market. Who do you think is going to propel HV5?
And Adobe probably will. because they know that being Adobe isn’t about clutching on to your own precious format. But integrating it with (or buying it from), other leading forces.

It’s how you dominate a market. Ask Google! They’re getting pretty good at it…

One Response to “HV5 will HTML 5 VIDEO make me any money today Google?”