A good day for Open Video. A long way to go!
What are the odds? At roughly the same time we saw the top two user generated video sites on the Web show us a glimpse at the future:
At Google I/O, Vic showed us an HTML 5 demo of YouTube. It looks the same, but the controls are in HTML, powering the video tag. The related videos on the right hand side had a cool new feature. As you mouse over them, they would play along. Right now seeking around in video is an awful experience. With larger pipes we will be able to do iMovie style flip-throughs to find exactly what they are looking for in a video.
DailyMotion goes a step further. They announced not only a demo area but “a new R&D platform dedicated to open video formats and web standards: openvideo.dailymotion.com“. You can find 300k videos all encoded in open formats right now.
Firefox has lead the way with Ogg Theora support, but as Mark Pilgrim noted Chromium can be built with support. The question as Mark says is “Will Chrome support Theora video?!”
Let’s not kid ourselves, piranhas are out there in the murky waters, so it is a balsy move for anyone to do this, especially folks with lots of $ to go after…. but we need to blast open the doors. Here’s to the march of Open Video.
