A brief diversionary ponderance upon Flash
Adobe claims Flash is “open”.
Of course, it’s only open in certain senses.
Content providers such as Hulu, YouTube, Channel 4, the BBC, and so on like Flash. These content providers aren’t keen on HTML5 (pick a codec, any codec).
These content providers like Flash precisely because it isn’t open in certain respects. If it was, there would be no benefit to putting as many eggs as possible into that particular basket: there’d be no reason (at least, none which aren’t comparatively easy to overcome) not to use HTML5 as well.
The very openness which Adobe claims Flash has and Apple abhors is the selfsame openness which Flash lacks and is a big selling point of Flash into these content providers.
If Flash (and I do mean all of it, including RTMPE) were open to the same extent as W3C and IETF specifications, it couldn’t be sold as a solution in the same way. For exactly the same reasons, don’t hold your breath waiting for browser vendors to come up with a DRM scheme for whatever-codec-and-container-becomes-the-standard.
This isn’t a campaign for HTML5: it doesn’t need one. This is a campaign for a bit of honesty for a change.
