Steve Jobs: Bye Bye Flash, Hello HTML5

[AaronWHUFC]

Apple's Steve Jobs today published an article where he openly justifies Apple's views on Flash, Adobe and the future of encoding and decoding on mobile devices. This comes after the criticism that Apple has faced for not endorsing the backbone of the web on their portable devices.

http://hardwarespot.co.uk/news/steve-jobs-html5-is-the-future/

[marsey99]

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

full press release ^^^


tbh i think jobs is full of it, hes betting it all on the up take of a new standard because they cant get flash to work right on their os. as much as i hate to say it ms has them licked on this as they spend alot of time and money to keep fixxing theirs to combat any holes found in their os or the software we run on it.

[andyn]

H.264 includes technologies based on patents managed by a company called MPEG LA.

Apple Inc. holds patents managed by MPEG LA. They've not officially owned up to the fact that H.264 patents are among them but.. they probably are.

From wikipedia:


On February 2, 2010 MPEG LA announced that H.264-encoded Internet Video that is free to end users would continue to be exempt from royalty fees until at least December 31, 2015. However, other fees remain in place. The license terms are updated in 5-year blocks.<SUP id=cite_ref-11 class=reference></SUP>
So, potentially, after 2015, mr jobs could be claiming royalty $$ from any media encoded with H.264. So the fact that they are pushing this and trying to stick the knife into flash is not really suprising.

Obviously it's also true that H.264 (being a proper video standard) IS much more efficient (ie less CPU intensive) than flash movies, which are basically a bit of a hack.

Another twist in the story is that shortly after the apple announcement, google announced that Android WILL be supporting flash (as well as H.264). http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/30/flash_on_android/