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.

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.

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.

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.

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. :)