Microsoft Sides With Apple on H.264 Video, Leaving Google in the Cold
Things are heating up and partners that you’d never expect are coming together to kick each other around. These three companies seem to flip-flop on a regular basis… once upon a time Google & Apple shared a lot of the same board of directors… things have really changed.
Microsoft’s just promised to place H.264 video at the core of its web experiences. Why should you care? Because it means the tech giant is siding with another company–Apple–at the expense of Google, which is pushing its own video codec.
In a blog posting titled “HTML5 and Web Video: Questions for the Industry from the Community,” Microsoft is effectively drawing the lines for a battle with Google about web video standards. It really doesn’t mince words: “A Web without video would be a dull Web and consumers, developers and businesses want video on the Web to just work. As an industry we know this and have, until recently, been on a path to make this a reality with HTML5 by integrating video into Web pages more natively using H.264.” This is a direct shot at Google, which has pledged to abandon default support for H.264 video in its Chrome browser, and a tacit admission that Apple’s push to make H.264 a de facto web standard has worked, and makes sense from a technical point of view.
