[statictype]

The flip side of this is that, while Internet Explorer probably won't support WebM unless Google indemnifies adopters, IE is almost as irrelevant as Opera in the arenas of both web video and The Future.

Internet Explorer still has a larger market share than Safari and iOS devices are barely a blip on the radar. By your logic, only Firefox, IE and Chrome should matter.

I can't watch your idealism on my iPad for the duration of a 6-hour flight

Well, we're not talking about videos that you load and play and you're iOS device. We're talking about video that is embedded in web-pages. Are you watching those during your 6 hour flight?

And maybe more to the point web video does revolve around iOS devices, because iOS users watch orders of magnitude more video than anybody else.

I'm reasonably sure you're greatly overestimating how much web-based video iOS devices consume.

[toddheasley]

> We're talking about video that is embedded in web-pages. Are you watching those during your 6 hour flight?

Increasingly, yes, I am watching those during my 6-hour flights. But I'm not talking about video embedded in web pages exclusively; I'm talking about video delivered via the web.

> Internet Explorer still has a larger market share than Safari

No doubt. But if you re-read what I wrote, I was trying to refute the parent comment's statement that "of course WebM exclusivity is the right way to go" without playing the IE card. I think IE's relevance ("in the arenas of both web video and The Future") is extremely questionable, so I don't want argument built on it. But if you accept that IE is relevant, then "of course WebM exclusivity is the right way to go" sounds even more crazy.

[statictype]

I'm talking about video delivered via the web.

Genuinely curious: What video are you talking about here that is delivered to your iOS device via the web? Are you referring to Netflix and iTunes? Or something else?

[toddheasley]

Maybe "web video" is too lazy of a term. What I'm talking about is video transferred via HTTP (or other protocol) from one computer to another. So, yes, that would be Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, YouTube, BitTorrent... Everything. I couldn't even guess what percentage of that whole is video embedded into HTML pages.

I make the distinction because, I think it's important to consider the problem in the larger context of digital media and connected devices, not just in the specific context of HTML rendered in a browser window. Right now we're talking about which video format is right for the HTML video tag, but the implications beyond that are huge. My response to the parent comment was not so much that I think "H.264 rulez," but that discussion of this subject was anything but "stupid" or "pointless whining." I'd like to see this discussion go on.

Late last year, my employer decided to walk away from a project that I had devoted 14 months of my life to because they were sued over SMS patents. This shouldn't be a debate about how much Apple fanboys love patents, when the debate is really about which compromises to make so that we can all make things with computers before we die. For example:

Is H.264 more of a threat to Internet video than fractured video support in web browsers? If you want to keep the debate to embedded video, that's a better question. H.264 made video finally good enough to watch on the Internet. Hardware-decoding made it possible to watch web video without melting your laptop battery. It solved real problems. And the promise of HTML5 video reinvigorated a whole lot of beleaguered content producers and developers. People are understandably reluctant to trade those things back. If you want to persuade them, explain what they get in that trade.

I think that if we talked about it, rather than calling names, we'd find that not many people are great lovers of software patents as they exist now. But then we'd have to be honest about what we're really fighting about: which battles to pick and who's children (HTML5 video, in this case) get sacrificed on the battlefield.