http://jilion.com/sublime/video -- a Video player for these approaching Dark Ages
This is precisely his point, web video used to be like this. "Firefox support is in the works". People are past the point where they need to have something "in the works" to do something as simple as showing their audience a video.
I am the biggest open web advocate you will find, but I don't see why its necessary to lie about the current state of affairs. HTML5 video is not ready for prime time. Will it be at some point? Of course. But pretending it is today is silly and distracts from fixing its obvious failings. The need to encode your video into multiple formats is a big deal, the fact IE doesn't support it at all is a big deal, the question of how to insert dynamic ads reliably into videos for people like Hulu is a big deal. Not to mention its still pretty darn buggy. The idea that Flash became useless yesterday is a joke.
hyperbolist was just offering an example of good-looking video via HTML5 to counter the claim that a world without Flash is a world in the dark ages of video.
"...so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues."
He's not saying the player won't look good or be sexy or whatever, he saying it will throw us back into the times when watching video depended on what OS/browser/codecs you had. This link demonstrates that exactly.
Instead of laughing at him and brushing of what he is saying by pointing to some demo that doesn't work in most people's browsers, we should take it as valid criticisms and demand the standards bodies get it together and fix these problems.
The link I submitted is indeed both an example of the "Dark Age problem" of HTML5 (that Firefox refuses to support H.264); and that video can be delivered quite satisfactorily via HTML5, without Flash.
We're all on the same page here, we want there to be open standards for video on the web, and that standard will be HTML 5. My point to you is that the current method of proselytizing this is preaching to the choir and not effective to the people that matter. If I ran a moderately successful medium traffic website, and I saw what the CTO said, then saw your response, clicked on it, and found that it didn't work on just about every browser, I would have to agree with the CTO, and then I may not bother expending the energy on switching the content on my site. Its simply a matter of fighting this thing intelligently.
The situation with the iPhone/iPod Touch not having Flash is not hunky dory. We live in a bubble where we simply don't use Flash that much and think "what's the big deal". I am 100% guilty of this myself. I am thrilled Flash is not on the iPhone and I absolutely hate Flash on my computer, exhibit A: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057673 . However, I can see that there exist use cases outside of my own experiences: I am not an 11 year old kid that plays Flash games all the time. What's scary to me is that a lot of people say that native SDK apps will fill the void here (as opposed to "HTML5").
Secondly, the problems with video on the web are still very real and unresolved. Firefox not supporting H.264 is not just some "bug", they are religiously against it. They refuse to put it into versions of Firefox that ship to countries where patents are not enforceable. It seems that the emphasis will be on the developer/user to figure out the story with that (just like before it was up to you to install xvid or quicktime or whatever, this is BAD). While we see this as a neat opportunity to tell developers to do it "the right way", many business will simply ask "why if Flash already works... everywhere... today". And again, no one seems to address the IE issue. If your answer is "not a problem", this thing won't get resolved.
The big conclusion here is not "Flash rocks". Its hey there are some real but tractable problems. Instead of exhausting our energy trying to convince people these problems don't exist or aren't really that much to worry about, lets use it to fix it.
Examples:
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/add-ambiance-to-your-videos...
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/connecting-html5-video/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/pop-art-video/
and the same with audio:
You don't understand. Yesterday, the fact that Firefox didn't support the video was "something that will be fixed one day, who knows when, maybe before 2020". Today, it is a big bug which needs to be addressed ASAP.
People don't compare managing software projects to herding cats just to be cute. Getting everyone to pull in the same direction really is 90% of the job. You need to start a stampede.
(The classic way to get programmers stampeding toward an actual product? Threaten to ship the product. Then, carry out that threat.)
The position of the players has not changed. But the second derivative has changed, and the first derivative will follow...