Comic Update: Webcast, Interrupted
September 08, 2010I’m going to get flak for this one.
Today’s comic features Stephanie Sullivan, Faruk Ateş and the Squirrel embroiled in a classic conflict of tribe in a setting that might be a bit familiar for Apple fans with some history under their belt.
Let’s lay it out on the table: On September 1, Apple announced some devices so small you could swallow them whole. I think they also promised to re-release a book about a duckling, although I might have lost some critical details there. Apple was so jazzed about this event that they made sure to provide a live video stream for their millions of fans to watch, “based on open standards”.
Excited people enjoyed the quality of this stream; some, including Faruk, made sure to rub this in with comments like: “Hey Flash people! I’m live streaming HD video at 30 fps and my CPU is at 10-15%. TAKE NOTICE.”
It’s clear how much a fan Faruk isn’t of Flash with later tweets like: “@dstorey That’s why I disagree: I think there’s plenty of people advocating HTML5 because of its Open Web technology aspect, Flash be damned.” (Edit: I’ve learned that I completely misconstrued what Faruk meant here, which was HTML5 rocking for it’s own sake, irregardless of Flash. My apologies.)
I bet that video stream was great. I also didn’t see it, and not for a lack of interest. The reason I didn’t is that viewing it required you to be watching on an Apple device, complete with Quicktime, an Apple plugin, using HTTP Live Streaming which is an Apple streaming protocol that may someday grow up to be an open standard but is far, far away from that.
Firefox on my PC was politely told to go jump in a lake when I tried to view said stream.
Let’s make this clear: vendor-specific device, vendor-specific plugin, vendor-specific streaming protocol. What, exactly, is “open standards” about this stream?
I understand the concept of tribe. Apple makes good products, and it’s worth celebrating their successes if you’re a fan. But in this modern, Internet-centric world, I abhor the concept of walled gardens. The Open Web we all celebrate, that many of us castigate Flash for apparently opposing, it doesn’t belong to any single company, including Apple. It doesn’t matter how slick their products are, how good their intentions, we can’t rely on any single vendor.
Stephanie’s (sarcastic) comment on Twitter sums up the problem the celebration of this streaming video represents: “Hey, not only have we created the most awesome walled garden, but now we want to push you to a single browser—ours!”
Is that the open web we want?
I don’t want to go back to ten years ago where I’d have to load up a specific browser, or worse yet, use a specific brand of computer, in order to access or use the content of the Internet. Heck, I don’t want to have to load a specific plugin (Flash, Quicktime, Silverlight, take your pick), especially in an ecosystem where vendors are creating devices that aren’t compatible with each other’s plugins. It doesn’t matter if the devices are in a slick glass case or blueberry-colored. I just want my web to work, regardless of who made the website, without a single vendor controlling the pipe.
I think you don’t give enough credence to the fact that this is still emerging technology. Is live HTTP streaming built into Firefox now? No. Can it be built into Firefox ever? Yes.
Is there a streaming video format that doesn’t require a browser plugin? I haven’t seen one.
Standards are only fantasies until vendors ship working code. Sure, it sucks that it only works in Apple stuff now, but compare this to Microsoft of 10 years ago—if they had built it’d be patent-encumbered and undocumented. If nothing else, it’s a step in the right direction.
Unirregardlessly disirregardful.
@Ryan – H.264 -is- patent-encumbered. And the particular technique used (HTTP Live Streaming) is only supported on Apple devices (not even only in Apple browsers). To call it an open standard stream is more than misrepresentation, it’s deceit. If Microsoft did it, we’d call them down for it. How is Apple different?
Guys, HTTP Live Streaming was created by Apple and is included in QuickTime. It has been submitted (in first draft) to possibly become a standard. It isn’t a standard at all.
So no, it’s not a step in the right direction to lock anyone not using your product (that is not a standard at all) out. Can they do it? Sure. It was their announcements. But they don’t need to be defended for doing it. That is all. :)
But you guys didn’t answer my question: what should they have used?
Motion JPEG
h.264 isn’t REALLY that encumbered anymore, since the group that owns it recently declared that it will be free to encode/decode forever.
Also, while I agree that it’s hypocritical to claim that the webcast was shown using open standards, I’ve been thinking about how rough the waters are going to get in the future. Just like with Navigator vs. Explorer, browsers are battling it out for market share, and this means new features, and incompatible standards.
Remember at An Event Apart when Jeff Veen talked about getting it done and iterating quickly? Browser vendors are doing just that, whether it be IE’s “web accelerators”, Safari’s CSS3 animation, or Firefox’s .webm support, these companies are trying to advance technology while pushing their own agenda.
It’s going to be a long time before we can rely on any of these technologies with any confidence, but it’s surely a good thing that there are people out there already putting them to the test.
@ragdoll Please read up on H.264. It’s only free if your not making any money with what you’re encoding. In a nutshell, still a no-go for big companies or browser vendors. It really changes nothing at all, sadly.
@Ryan – In the absence of an open standard, how about a stream that is universally accessible by the major browsers? Those do exist, and granted they require plugins, but at least then it’s not a single vendor’s fan club that gets the resulting product.
I’m willing to accept that we need crutches on our way towards an open web, but I don’t accept intentional garden walls as part of that path.
In some ways it’s in the interest (if you squint) of the MPEG group to take the position it does on H.264, since its heritage is based around (and constituents are) large electronics manufacturers and content distributors. It only takes a few smart people to make something like a codec, but it takes massive political pull to get it adopted. Of course, cash has historically been a decent surrogate for political pull.
The interesting thing about protocols and interchange formats is that they thrive by adoption. Part of what makes the web (or rather, the internet) so powerful is that you don’t have to pay anybody for the right to commercialize the use of these protocols and data formats, and that doing so makes the whole more valuable. Even more interesting is the apparent chilling effect the mere presence of a patent elicits, despite a royalty-free license (such as with XPointer, many moons ago). It’ll be interesting to see if the vested interests can muscle their standard into being.
All that said, it’s a bit of semantic hocus-pocus to tout H.264 as an open standard when it only in the narrowest of interpretations free.
@Ryan, compare and contrast. About a decade ago, Microsoft announced that they had some patents related to styling, and pushed W3C to develop a policy ensure royalty-free licenses would support the open standard and allow anyone to build on it. In the group I co-chair now (web-apps), Apple have twice claimed they have patents that cover essential technology and are not prepared to offer a non-discriminatory license to them *under any terms*. In both cases, the claims have been analysed and appear to be completely bogus.
As to your substantive question: right now there is no single format that is natively implemented in all browsers. Indeed, a certain company in Cupertino has threatened (with nothing more than FUD-inducing weasel words) the Ogg Theora format with unspecified patent suits, in a move which is presumably designed to frighten implementors away. However, many other organisations manage to encode video in a couple of formats, and it would seem unlikely that Apple doesn’t have the marketing money available to make some intern do the few minutes of work that is required.