Senior VP of Marketing Discusses Technical Limitations, Hilarity Ensues.
I love reading or listening to people talk out of their ass about HTML (especially HTML5) and the surrounding technologies. Here we have Jeff Whatcott of Brightcove in a recent interview by ME (Mobile Entertainment):
When you get to iOS, for reasons that are not entirely clear, there is no Flash, so we have to rely on video delivery through HTML5.
Not entirely clear? The CEO writes a front page manifesto detailing exactly why now until forever iOS will not support Flash, and reasons are “not entirely clear?”
But HTML5 advertising technology is in its infancy. HTML5 is today where Flash advertising was in 2004, although we’re working feverishly with our partners to eliminate the disparity.
Oh man, how are we ever going to get ads into HTML? Hey Mr. Whatcott, there’s a company that made $21 billion USD in advertising revenue in 2008 and it was almost entirely delivered using HTML text and images. Maybe you can ask them for help. I forget their name. Maybe you could Google them.
Media companies and marketers don’t just want to have video playback, they want to have it playback with advertising, or in a branded player with their own logos and overlays,
I’ve got good news: This isn’t a problem. You can create your own controls and make a player. You just make them in HTML and use the JavaScript API for video. Overlays, logos, advertising, etc. Standard HTML and JavaScript my friend. Whatcott and many others fail to realize that HTML5 is HTML. Let’s all say it together:
HTML5 is just HTML.
They want to get analytics around the advertising and playback of video - how many people, how far they watched, where they were, whether they shared video with friends or not. But for HTML5, none of that technology is there.
This is just a lie. He’s saying, “There’s no such thing as action tracking analytics in plain HTML.” Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of Google Analytics or any other modern analytics package on the market knows this is false. Sure, you’ll have to write a neat chunk of script to pull off some of the fancy bits, but this is the case with ActionScript in Flash based players as well.
We’re having to write a lot of additional code to make that possible.
We come to the heart of the issue! It isn’t that HTML5 makes these things hard. It’s that an entire sector has been banking on one technology continuing its dominance in the video delivery space. Now that Steve Jobs has taken a figurative shit on Flash’s face, the industry is coming together, in one voice, united, to declare:
“WWWWAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.”
Get over it. Hire more JS developers, write some of this crazy HTML5, and get back to work.
I suspect the technical staff at Brightcove is already on top of this. From what I can tell, they do good work, and I’d wager they’ve got a few level heads writing code. So really, no offense to the company. I hope they deliver the shit out of video to all their supported platforms. But this interview is what you end up with when you let the marketing department shout off and they lack the technical chops.
