The battle between Flash and HTML5 has largely revolved around video, with Flash proponents pointing out how lame it is to open up your browser on an iPad and not be able to play a Flash video. And yet HTML5-friendly video has quickly been adopted by a majority of video websites and video players. Today video search engine MeFeedia released some stats showing that 63 percent of the 30 million videos in its index are now HTML5-compatible. That number is up from 10 percent a year ago, 26 percent last May, and 54 percent in October, 2010.
MeFeedia indexes 30,000 video sites large and small, including Hulu, CBS, ABC, YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, and DailyMotion. Among larger media sites, HTML5 video already reached two thirds last May, and is already above 90 percent, according to Encoding.com. In terms of mobile devices that don’t support Flash, they now account for 5 percent of MeFeedia’s video playbacks, up from 1 percent a year ago.
MeFeedia’s numbers may be more conservative, but they point in the same direction. HTML5 video, and the H.264 codec specifically, is the new standard for video. Okay, good. Now that we have that settled, we can all move on and keep watching videos on our iPads. Except maybe not because Google doesn’t like H.264. Uh-oh, here we go again.