I will be presenting a position paper at the W3C video workshop next week. I will be joined by Siliva from annodex. We will push standardization around free formats. Our position papers have been posted on the w3 site. Here is an excerpt from my position paper:
Critical to making video a first class citizen on the web is extending the properties of other first class citizens like text and images as they apply to video. These properties should include:
- Standardization around a freely implementable format. So both proprietary and free browsers can support playback and (eventually) encoding without licensing costs.
- A standard open format for search engines and web services to access video metadata such as close captions, tags, chapter info etc.
- Standard ways of transclusion/reference/embedding of video content. Additionally a standard url request scheme for retrieving segments of video streams is needed.
- Use of existing http protocols for access and retrieval of video content.