Another blow to Flash: Microsoft announces future of the web is HTML5, IE9 to support h.264 video playback only

Flash’s days of dominating video on the web are looking increasingly numbered. Fresh off the heals of Steve Jobs voicing his thoughts on Flash, Microsoft chimes in with another blow, Internet Explorer 9 will only support video playback in H.264 format with HTML5. Here’s the two major quotes from Microsoft:

The future of the web is HTML5. …In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only

If you’re not totally sick of the Flash debate, the entire piece is reproduced below, from Microsofts IE blog (emphasis mine):

There’s been a lot of posting about video and video formats on the web recently. This is a good opportunity to talk about Microsoft’s point of view.

The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.

H.264 is an industry standard, with broad and strong hardware support. 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. You can read about the benefits of hardware acceleration here, or see an example of the benefits at the 26:35 mark here. For all these reasons, we’re focusing our HTML5 video support on H.264.

Other codecs often come up in these discussions. The distinction between the availability of source code and the ownership of the intellectual property in that available source code is critical. Today, intellectual property rights for H.264 are broadly available through a well-defined program managed by MPEG LA. The rights to other codecs are often less clear, as has been described in the press. Of course, developers can rely on the H.264 codec and hardware acceleration support of the underlying operating system, like Windows 7, without paying any additional royalty.

Today, video on the web is predominantly Flash-based. While video may be available in other formats, the ease of accessing video using just a browser on a particular website without using Flash is a challenge for typical consumers. Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance. We work closely with engineers at Adobe, sharing information about the issues we know of in ongoing technical discussions. Despite these issues, Flash remains an important part of delivering a good consumer experience on today’s web.

Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager, Internet Explorer

Note that this does not directly say that Internet Explorer 9 will not support the Flash plugin, it just means that it’s HTML5 video playback support is h.264 only. This is particularly interesting considering Microsofts push forward with the Silverlight plugin, which is viewed by many as a direct competitor to Flash itself.

[ via MSDN Blogs: HTML 5 Video ]