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There is no deep conspiracy behind Apple's and Microsoft's support for HTML5 video and h.264. They are adopting HTML5 for video because video is becoming more

There is no deep conspiracy behind Apple's and Microsoft's support for HTML5 video and h.264. They are adopting HTML5 for video because video is becoming more and more essential part of the web and an open standard for it makes the browsers of both companies independent of any particular plugin. No sane company wants to be dependent on others. As for them choosing h.264 - that's simple too - h.264 is open standard (as in, no single company or other entity has the ability to change it at some random point in some random way) and is widely used already (i.e. there is a lot of software and hardware support). On top of that the patent situation with h.264 is much clearer and safer (e.g. given h.264's huge use, the longer no submarine patents surface, the higher the likelihood that there aren't any). edit: fixed typos

ergo98 16y ago
>There is no deep conspiracy behind Apple's and Microsoft's support for HTML5 video and h.264. Who said there's a deep conspiracy theory? Saying "they aren't being entirely open with their motives" is an observation that is almost always true of almost all businesses. This is a classic conflict of interest. It's like finding out that your doctor who is telling you that you really need to remove a kidney has a lucrative side business selling kidneys. This is really all so ridiculous, though. The video thing is a giant red herring -- the truth is that Flash as a video container is almost always used to thinly serve up h.264 these days. Yes, the stream should be decoupled from the player. No doubt. Yet that blanket idea about video is used to mask the incredible gap that HTML5 currently has on mobile devices.