The OLD Blip Blog • A fierce embrace of HTML5

A fierce embrace of HTML5

We’re embracing HTML5, starting today, with a brand new HTML5 player that supports advertising.

Blip has been built, from the ground up, as an open platform. We were the first major video host to offer direct links to uploaded video files. We were the first to offer RSS with enclosures. We were the first to support OGG Theora — both as an upload format and as a playback format using the Cortada player. And we’ve been incredibly excited about HTML5 video playback for as long as people have been talking about HTML5.

There’s been one thing holding us back, though: advertising. Advertising is incredibly important to blip. Our mission is to make independent production sustainable, and the primary financial way we do that we do this is through an advertising revenue share. So we couldn’t embrace HTML5 in a big way until we could serve ads in HTML5 — otherwise we would be shortchanging the producers who rely on us for their income.

Today that changes. Today blip’s CTO Justin Day announced at the Open Video Conference that our new HTML5 player is going live in the next couple days — and he also announced his intention to transition all of blip to HTML5. The new HTML5 player is almost identical to our Flash player — it supports advertising, sports the same slick look, supports sharing and everything else. There’s really only one difference: it’s about five times faster than the Flash player.

We’re going to switch to full HTML5 playback as fast as we can. Now that we can serve ads in HTML5 in a scalable and reproducible way… now that producers can make as much money from a video view in the HTML5 player as in the Flash player… now there’s nothing standing in our way. The HTML5 player is already the default on mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad and Android phones. As browser support improves and compatibility improves we’ll be rolling the HTML5 player out everywhere we can.

This is an exciting day for blip and an exciting day for the open Web. Next time you’re watching a blip video check and see if the player is HTML5… more and more often it will be.