[cstrahan]

The reasoning I've seen for iOS/Safari not supporting webm: there isn't hardware support on the iPhone, which would hurt battery life. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16319651

However, I think that would be poor judgement on Apple's part. I mean, sure, preventing someone from watching a webm might preserve battery life, but why stop there: imagine the savings if they were to strip iOS down to merely being able to make phone calls!

Let the user consume whatever media they want, and if that media drains battery, that's on the user for making that choice. I can see that Apple wouldn't want people to complain about iPhone battery life if webm took over the web, but then I wouldn't mind some minor nag at the beginning of playback to the effect of "hey, this video you're playing may drain your battery faster than you might otherwise expect, so take it up with whoever is serving this content to provide an alternative encoding for iOS".

[murgindrag]

That was fascinating, not so much for the technical discussion, as the presumptions behind it. That discussion views users as pure consumers, and doesn't even contemplate a human being might want to make a video, a web page, or share a video file (except through Youtube).