Sure, Flash is dead. But are the Web video wars over?

Peace is at hand

Chris Dawson: My colleague, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, argued that, in many ways, the Web video wars are just beginning, entering a new phase rather than an actual armistice.Well, North and South Korea are technically still at war, too, and, while tensions remain high, not much is likely to come of it besides posturing. The same goes for the ongoing Flash vs. HTML5 skirmishes and scuffles over competing video codecs. Plenty will happen behind the scenes and the major players (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, and even Adobe) will make much ado about various advances and setbacks.

The bottom line, though, is that no one is stupid enough to jeopardize end users' ability to watch Netflix or YouTube on their particular browser, OS, or hardware. The ultimate goal, after all, is platform market share. All the rest are just details that will be transparent to most producers and consumers of video (who, in 2012, are often the same people).

The war rages on

As I think it's become clear Chris and I really aren't that far apart at all. For better or worse, Adobe Flash is going to stick around for a long time to come.

The real problem is that as we turn more and more to mobile devices fewer and fewer of them will support Flash. That's going to end up vexing some users. They, in turn, are going to yell at the Web site owners and they will response by supporting HTML5 video.

Unfortunately, HTML5 video isn't a real solution. It's a band-aid. Under it, Web developers are going to have to support not one but several different video container and codec formats. What they'd like is a single universal and real Web video format so they won't have to go to all this extra effort. They're not going to get it though. We're no where close to such a standard.

Like it or not the closest we've ever come to such a thing is Adobe Flash. The Web video wars are going to keep going on, though hopefully end-users won't see much of it, for years to come and Flash will still be a player in these battles.