In ReadRightWeb he describes it as a video delivery platform which “Right now … the service is bare-bones. It’s a form that you can put any video file’s URL in and you’ll get HTML5 embed code and an API to poke it with. Eventually the service will support all kinds of analytics, authentication and even super-simple video editing. “Anyone who can hack a Tumblr or WordPress theme,” Handroll says, “can be a video editor — and with the same tools.”

In this world of huge online video growth, it should come as no surprise there’s great demand for companies that support that video consumption and growth. Like Boxee.tv, Kylo.tv, and Clicker.tv (all having appeared on this blog before); Handroll.tv chose the .tv community for it’s company. .tv is a great way to tell your visitors and the marketplace that you’re about video.

Second; trolling the booths, attending the panels, and talking to the participants last week I was struck by how much is going on with video and how diverse the community is. Again, one knows that, but a conference like this brings it home. There are big video companies like Yahoo (a keynote speaker); down to smaller creators just starting out as well as representatives from universities and the government sector.

A panel on video e-commerce had some interesting education and statistics. Ogilvy shared that in their cause marketing campaign with Sears, video emails get three times the engagement compared to emails without video. Their word of advice is that you should pick a video that’s moving, emotionally engaging and not just a reused ad. They described their efforts with video and an IBM campaign. Using video got them the # 1 organic spot on Google for their collaboration software — another example of video helping search.

Shopping Western Style was there and had really embraced video, even producing a TV show to support their store and brand. They quoted a 50% conversion increase in product sales with video, a 25% decrease in returns and a 593% increase in ticket sales with video. They too mentioned the SEO benefits of video seeing 8 of 10 first page listings with video and 90% on Bing and Yahoo. Some words of advice from the panel were shorter videos work better (60 seconds or less work best for e-commerce), tagging your video appropriately is important and creating engaging video is key, an important point though it’s a bit subjective. I liked this quote: “the biggest competitor for any company is for people’s attention, and video helps you get that attention”.

Systems to measure video experiences seem in their infancy and was also a topic on many panels. Jim Louderback, the CEO of Revision3 noted that paid video placements can be bogus numbers since 30% fall below the fold, the sound could be off, or some other barrier to usefulness and exposure is in place. The panelist from Razorfish was less than complementary of YouTube’s analytics and suggested Clickable as a useful tool.

HTML5 got some play (pun intended) at the show. In the e-commerce session, someone asked if HTML5 was important and the panelist said it’s a must support, that 96% of his mobile traffic came from the iPhone. While that speaks more to Steve Jobs’ religious war on Flash than it does on HTML5 generally, it’s an interesting point.

At the panel on HTML5 and open standards, a more a technical discussion, it was obvious there is a big interest in the topic (it was standing room only with people pouring out the door). The ecosystem is obviously early with a lack of tools, analytics, security and DRM. One content owner from CNET said they used HTML5 for a iPad application without many of those things. Their thought was iPads are still a small number and while they’d love to have all the hooks and help they have in their current Flash products, it was worth doing and releasing in 10 days to get out there. The sense I got was that while those tools and work flows need to be built and worked out for HTML5, they will be eventually.

The question was asked “what do we get better with HTML5″. While the obvious topics of a lighter less bloated experience and mobile were mentioned, one participant paraphrased a former Secretary of Defense by saying “It’s so early we don’t know what we don’t know yet”. But there was optimism that the new road would be interesting and innovative for video.

Speaking of mobile, that panel said that mobile was in many ways an easier environment for getting paid for video since paying via mobile is easier and people are used to paying for phone service. The panelists also agreed that mobile video was an “and” for their video not just an “or”.

And I’ll close with the tag line from the CMO from Kodak — if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a thousand pictures.

Below is a video from Beet.tv with Adobe’s Jen Taylor talking Flash players and innovations being made in bringing a high-quality presentation to streaming video.

In my previous blog post, I discussed the new tag, its usage, and how we are going to have native tags on the web. It just so happens that there is a whole range of technologies, standards and market force that is driving this new native video technology and shaping its future. In order to understand this landscape, it is probably a good idea to have a quick understanding of the video technology, namely video containers and video codecs.

What are Video Containers?
A video container defines how to store video and audio streams in a single file. When you think of video files, you usually thing of “AVI” or “MP4″ files, but they are in reality called “container formats”. A close analogy for container formats is a ZIPfile.

Don’t forget that a ZIP file is a container format that can contain any sort of file within it. It does not really define the contents of the file. In the same way, a video container format defines HOW to store video things (video stream, audio stream, track information, synchronization information, metadata etc.) and not WHAT kinds of data to store. Well, I say that cringingly because not all video streams are compatible with all container formats. Shucks!

Anyway, there are several video container formats in the marketplace. Some of the popular ones are:

• MPEG4 - The Movie Picture Experts Group (MPEG4) video container files usually have an extension of .mp4 or .m4v. This is a specification from Apple and is based on Apple’s old QuickTime (.mov) container.

• FLV - The Flash Video (FLV) container files usually have an extension of .flv. This is a specification from Adobe and is of course used by Adobe Flash runtime, which also supports files based on MPEG4 container. This is very popular and is used heavily in the Internet.

• OGG - The OGG video container format files usually have an extension of .ogv. OGG is an open standard, open-source friendly format that is unencumbered by any known patents. So, clearly Firefox supports this natively and of course all major Linux distributions bundle support for this container.

• AVI – The Audio Video Interleave (AVI) video container files usually have an extension of .avi. This container format from Microsoft has fallen behind in technology and does not support the feature set of many modern containers. Over time many companies have tried to extend it and generally in incompatible ways.

What are Video Codecs?
A video codec defines what kind of data to store in the file. Imagine you’re watching a video; when you do so, there is a video codec (Coder Decoder) that has to interpret the bytes in the stream to display the video and synchronize it with the audio. Hence, think of a video codec as a data structure and an algorithm by which video and audio has to be encoded.

There are several video codecs in the market place. Some of the popular ones are:

• MPEG-4 ASP – The MPEG4 ASP (Advanced Simple Profile) is developed by MPEG group and is a popular codec that can be embedded in popular containers such as AVI and MP4. This codec is patent encumbered and is licensed through the MPEG LA consortium.

• H.264 – The H.264 codec is also known as “MPEG-4 part 10″ or “MPEG-4 AVC”. This format developed by the MPEG group prides itself in having a single codec that can be used in cell phones (low-bandwidth, low CPU device) and desktops (high-bandwidth and high CPU device). This is licensed under the MPEG LA consortium too and is considered one of the best.

• THEORA – This is a codec developed by Xiph.org. It is royalty free and goes hand in hand with OGG container. It’s supported by Firfox 3.5+ and popular Linux distributions by default.

So, what is the standard?
HTML5 defines the tag, but does not specify the video container or the codec. The question is when we use the tag in our HTML page, which codec can we count on being present in all browsers and across all platforms including mobile devices. This is an interesting question and a challenging battle between the big players. H.264 is technically better than MPEG-4 and THEORA, with support for multiple profiles lo – low and high end profiles. It also has a good market share as it is currently embedded in many popular products including Apple’s iPhone, Apple TV, Adobe Flash, YouTube HD, and Android phones.

It so happens that Google acquired On2 technologies within the last year and gained rights to a codec called VP8. The VP8 codec is said to be superior to H.264 with more than 40 new innovations delivering outstanding quality at low bitrates and low complexity, thus reducing the cost of streaming video. Interestingly, there is a rumor that Google plans to open source this technology (this may be announced in the Google IO conference this year). Google is obviously interested in entering this space. Flash Video, the most popular internet video format, is feeling left out as Apple announces no support for Flash in iPod and iPad.

As you can see, the big boys are playing politics, but the reality is we will eventually have native VIDEO on the web. And, what does that mean to the average user and to video? It means we will finally have video with no plugins, it will simply work on all browsers and all platforms including mobile phones (and iPads…and that next thing we haven’t thought of yet). You think video is growing now. Just wait!

Though it’s just beginning, I suspect this blog will be more about the future than it will be about the past. However, when I saw this posting on my friend’s Facebook page (thanks Mike). I thought there were some interesting similarities to today’s pontifications and ponderings. This site from the American Historical Association has snippets of what people debated about television in the 1940s.

• It talks about movie studios being fearful of putting their good movies on TV, as people might stop going to movie theaters (substitute TV, for online, and how much different is the question now)?
• There’s a whole section on the FCC and spectrum. We might have finally given up the ghost on that one after 60 years with the switch to digital; but the debate still continues if you count wireless broadband in the mix to get video via the Internet;
• There’s a whole debate on standards; do we have the right ones to go forward (OK, in 1945 it might not have been Blu-ray verses HD-DVD, or HTML5…but you get the picture…pun intended); and
• There’s a section about advertising’s place in the new medium and what role subscriptions play (free verses paid is NOT a new dilemma).

So, in summary, everything old is new again. In the next 60 years (yikes…that’s 2070) how will our grandchildren look back at our debates and discussions about video in the dawn of the 21st century? And, how much will be a slight twist of today’s debates.

Photo via Library of Virginia: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_virginia/

Anyone who has visited YouTube knows that you can embed video in a web page. But prior to HTML5, there was no standard based way to embed video in your web page. Almost all the videos you have watched on the web have been enabled through a third party plugin – say RealPlayer, QuickTime, or Flash. This current way of embedding video in the HTML page is complicated. Moreover, if you go to a platform that does not support the plug-in, you are out of luck.

In 2010, close to 20 years since the invention of the web, I say that video should be part of the browser. Multimedia is obviously on the rise and is here to stay and should be an integral part of the web platform. That’s exactly what is happening with the new HTML5 recommendation.

A primer on how we embed video now
In order to get an appreciation of the new HTML 5 <video> tag, it is probably worthwhile to understand how people embed video now (prior to HTML5). Netscape in its glory days created the <embed> tag for embedding any kind of plugin including Java applets, Flash, video and audio player plugins in web pages. Initially this tag was used to embed audio and video besides others. But this tag was not accepted as part of HTML specification. The W3C instead standardized on using the <object> tag to embed any kind of plugins. The <object> tag has since been a powerful way to embed any plugin including Flash. So most of the video including advertisements on the web and of course YouTube use the <object> tag to embed video in web pages. Here is an example of using the object tag to embed video in a web page:

<object classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″ width=”525″ height=”426″ codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0″><param value=”always” /><param name=”src” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/F2XbFnBiChQ&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;” /><param name=”allowfullscreen” value=”true” /><embed type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”525″ height=”426″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/F2XbFnBiChQ&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;” allowfullscreen=”true”></embed></object>

The above is the most popular Flash embed method and is the default choice when publishing your Flash movie. You may also note that the object tag encloses an <embed> tag with almost the same attributes as a fallback mechanism.

What is the new HTML 5 way?
HTML5 is the latest revision to the previous HTML 4.01 recommendation which was released in 2009. The editors of HTML5 are Ian Hickson of Google and David Hyatt of Apple, both of whom are leading the way on a whole range of new features. But what’s cool in HTML 5 is the new <video> tag that really works similar to the <image> tag. You don’t have to have the complicated <object> and <embed> tags, instead use the <video> tag. So let’s look at an example of what it would take to embed video in HTML5. It’s as simple as using the <video> tag with src attribute and it looks like this:

<video src=”http://example.com/MyMovie.ogg”>

What’s really interesting is that the different browsers that support <video> tag support different codecs. So at this time, you can drop in the ogg version or the H.264 version and so you just drop in the two different source files and the browser picks the best one. Here is an example:

<video controls>
<source src=”http://example.com/myMovie.ogg”>
<source src=”http://example.com/myMovie.mp4″>
Your browser does not support the video element.
</video>

What is the big deal?
You may be wondering…so what…we used to embed video before using <object> tag and now we can use the <video> tag. Well, don’t forget the difference is the exponentially growing mobile platform. If you recall in an earlier paragraph I mentioned that if you go to a platform that does not not support the plug-in, you are out of luck. The reality is many mobile platforms can’t support video because the plug-in is not available. But, this is changing. With many of the mobile platforms embedding Firefox, Safari, Opera or Chrome browsers within them and with HTML5 video support on the rise, these mobile platforms will be able to support video natively just like the desktop. And this is game changing.

[Photo via http://www.flickr.com/photos/justinsomnia/]