Web video is all the rage these days, with seemingly everybody getting into the action. The 900 pound gorilla, of course, is YouTube. Estimates of YouTube’s size vary from 100 million to 250 million videos. My suspicion is that it’s towards the top end of that range. But even 100 million videos is more than all the other providers combined.
Yes, there are video sites other than YouTube. And, no, they’re not all porn sites, although there certainly is a healthy number of those. Other video sites include Vimeo, CNN, ESPN, LiveLeak, Fox News, Hulu, MTV, Newsweek, YouKu, and at least two dozen more that I’m too lazy to list. All the major networks have video sites. Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, and even Google have videos. Yes, Google video competes with YouTube. Video is big.
Sorry. You’ll have to locate the porn sites yourself if you’re so inclined.
That’s a Good Thing. Except … Except that every site has its own video player. In order to play a video on the Web, you have to download the player and then stream the video through it. It reminds me of the early days of video stores, when you had to rent a movie and a VCR. Will that be VHS or Beta?.
Users don’t see this as a problem. Yet. Considering that many users see YouTube as the only place for video on the web, that’s no surprise. But Web developers who want to embed videos from many different sources notice this problem in a big way. Every player requires different embed code. Every player looks different, with controls in different places and sometimes garish branding so that you know, without any doubt, where that video came from. Some players have a JavaScript API that lets the embedding page control it, and others don’t.
The result is a horrible mishmash of wonky controls and hacked Web pages trying to get embedded video to work well. Developers have to choose between excluding a particular video source, or including it with the understanding that those videos will look and work differently, and possibly cause their pages to crash, hang, or otherwise misbehave. We don’t have just two formats to worry about, but 30 or more. And for each one we have to know the magic incantation for obtaining the player, displaying it in a Web page, making it play a video and, if we’re lucky, controlling playback with a common set of user controls. It’s maddening.
As it stands now, playing a video in a Web page is a heavyweight operation. Web video is exploding, and this problem will only get worse unless the major players get together and standardize on a single video player. Or at least a standard for embedded video player behavior and a standard API so that developers can concentrate on delivering the content that video providers want us to deliver.
And therein lies the problem. It’s almost a certainty that YouTube will thumb its nose at the crowd and go its own way. If we were extremely lucky YouTube would make their player available to the community, but that’s highly unlikely. The better and more likely (although still not very likely) option is that the second tier of providers get together and create a standard. Then, at least, developers would only have to worry about two players: YouTube and everybody else.
I honestly don’t know what to expect here. If my experience with MP3 music files on the Web is any indication, I probably shouldn’t hope for too much. Although it’s true that the vast majority (well over 90%, based on six months’ crawling for different formats) of audio on the Web is MP3, there’s no standard player for streaming, and no standard API for controlling the disparate players. And don’t even get me started on the pain of playing naked MP3 files. Video will be much bigger than Web audio ever was. I shudder at the thought of trying to handle 300 different providers rather than just the few dozen we have now.