David Emery Online

Hi there, I’m David. This is my website. I work in music for Apple. You can find out a bit more about me here. On occasion I’ve been known to write a thing or two. Please drop me a line and say hello. Views mine not my employers.

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31 May 2007

Two interesting online video related tidbits:

YouTube on Apple TV to use H.264

Real Makes Its Video Move: Next Real Player will download Flash Video

Firstly, continuing on with the rather prolonged Apple discussion yesterday the news that the delay for the YouTube feature on the AppleTV is due to the fact that they are re-encoding the entire YouTube catalogue to use h264 (which is the de-facto Apple/Quicktime codec). This move has all sorts of knock-on effects and questions.

  1. YouTube must store the original versions of all videos uploaded.
  2. The AppleTV is going to be – for the time being at least – the only place you’ll be able to view higher quality YouTube videos. If they aren’t higher quality, why would they be re-encoding?
  3. If the AppleTV can access higher quality h264 versions of YouTube videos, someone will be able to figure out how to download them from a PC.
  4. Is this the first step towards either a higher quality (paid for?) YouTube service, or maybe video downloads?

I think number 3 is the most important point; there’s going to be a large amount of people out there that have uploaded their videos on to YouTube – as opposed to some other form of distribution method – solely because the quality isn’t that great and they don’t need to worry about people downloading their videos. For anyone that would like to make revenue from higher quality online video, but use YouTube as a low quality piece of promotion, this could be a really unwelcome surprise.

Real’s new (although not released yet) version of their player touches upon similar ground, as it allows you to take any video online and download it to either play in their player, or burn to a DVD. By the looks of things, it’ll work with Flash Video (and hence YouTube, MySpace Videos, Metacafe etc), Quicktime and WMV as long as it’s not DRM protected.

This is the last ditch actions of a company that have realised they are almost completely obsolete; Flash Video has won the online video war, and Quicktime – through iTunes – has won the offline video war.

Being able to download videos from YouTube is nothing new – you can do it right now, really quite easily – but with Real making it the focus of their first new player in 2 years it’s going to become even more mainstream. While they may be on their deathbed, they still have a very large install base and high profile.

What it all boils down to is that everyone always needs to remember two key things: 1) If you put media on the internet – in whatever form – someone will be able to download it, and this is only getting easier and easier and 2) if you use a free online service, don’t forget that you really don’t have any control over the content that you upload. YouTube could launch a premium service tomorrow with high quality videos, and the original up-loaders wouldn’t get a penny.

And YouTube probably will do something like that eventually.

From: Articles

31 May 2007