Flash Back and Flash Forward- The role of proprietary standards and innovation

posted by on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 9:29 am

There has been a lot of talk about the future of the Flash format especially after the launch of the iPad since both the iPad and the iPhone do not support Flash.

Like many people, I am a fan of HTML5 and recent developments in the evolution of HTML5 indicate that it will now become the technology of choice for all browser vendors. Flash is the current de-facto web standard for video. With HTML5, we won’t need the embedded flash plug-in since video will be rendered natively in the browser. This is a good development of course.

But it is not that simple.

If you use flash (a proprietary but de-facto format), a majority of current web users can render video (with a free plug-in). If you don’t use flash, the option is H.264 codec, which has licensing requirements from MPEG LA. The Mozilla browser supports another alternative – the open source OGG Theora format, but there are some licensing requirements for OGG Theora which are unclear. Google has acquired On2 supposedly for the intention of open sourcing it with a view of solving the above problem.

Thus, the alternatives to Flash are H.264, OGG Theora and On2, the future directions of all are not clear yet.

If we ‘flash back’ ten years ago, Flash has been a great boon for the Web and has brought the Web to its current state even with a proprietary format. The question is – what will we see ‘flash forward’ in the next 10 years?

Clearly, HTML5 will have a significant role to play in the next decade. This means, the Web becomes a platform. However, the ‘flash back – flash forward’ story illustrates the point that proprietary formats have a role to play in innovation at the initial stage of a new technology. In other words, the Web video has taken more than ten years to catch up through HTML5. One could argue that pragmatic developers will choose multiple options. This will mean ‘fragmentation’ but it will also mean that in a practical sense, certain features like video will take a longer time to standardise

Thus, Flash will have a role to play even in the ‘flash forward’, i.e. next decade.

As a broader concept, the story illustrates that while standards catch up eventually, proprietary formats have a role to play in the initial stage of the evolution of new innovation and subsequently, we will see a mix of standards.