First Adobe Flashed Apple, Now YouTube, Vimeo Go HTML5

If you own an iPhone, you've run up against the downside of dominant market share. Local software company Adobe is responsible for Flash, which, besides being a terrific way to annoy site visitors as they wait for landing pages to load or as they scramble to turn down music that blares suddenly, has become the default way to display animation and video on the internet.

But Apple has so far refused to allow Flash to play in the iPhone's Safari browser. They have their reasons. Adobe has responded to the more technical variety, but perhaps sensing that Apple wouldn't be happy with anything less than iFlash, they have been hammering and sawing on Flash CS5. (They're foregoing a public beta, in fact, to roll out the software faster.)

CS5 contains a packager that "will automatically convert any Flash app into an iPhone app," reports the Washington Post. (A Hulu app, that's what that means! Or it should. Get on that, Hulu. Oh, good.)

But the delay has already given Adobe (and Microsoft's Silverlight, for that matter) a competitor they weren't looking for.

Yesterday YouTube announced it's supporting HTML5 video players, which (currently) work in Chrome, Safari, and ChromeFrame on Internet Explorer. Today it's Vimeo. ReadWriteWeb explains that, "An HTML5 video player will allow videos to be viewed without Adobe's Flashplayer plug-in, videos will load faster and developers will be able to build all kinds of other intriguing features into a media delivery scheme based on the next version of HTML."

You can sign up for an experimental HTML5 video player here.

I am not backing a particular horse here--my hope is simply to maximize the streaming video I can watch via iPhone, as a way of paying AT&T back for their unlimited data plan pricing. Flash, HTML5--I just want to play Lawrence of Arabia in high rotation until a data center buckles.