This is interesting. Google still hasn't completely converted over to HTML5 video for YouTube. You've been able to opt in to the trial for years now (http://www.youtube.com/html5). But it seems that more than half the videos I watch are still using the crappy old Flash player.
Content wise, YouTube has way more content to convert to be able to take advantage of HTML5. I wonder if Netflix is having to convert video on the backend for this as well. Or if they're just using a base format that allows for delivery over Silverlight and HTML5 without having to re-encode and store. But they wouldn't really be re-encoding on the fly though, would they? That would seem to be hugely resource intensive. Does anyone know more about how they're doing this on the backend?
Probably because they haven't implemented all of the same features in HTML5 as they have in the Flash version, such as ad overlays and annotations. It's up to the person posting the videos whether or not to use these features, and if they do, it forces the player to use Flash.
>I wonder if Netflix is having to convert video on the backend for this as well.
They won't. They're using H.264 video, which all major browsers can play in HTML5 <video> tags now. Not so sure how they'd handle stuff like multiple audio tracks though - as far as I know they're bit of an issue now even if muxed with the video, and if you don't want to load extra audio tracks then you're pretty much out of luck since there's no decent way to play video and audio separately in sync with HTML5 at the moment (a combination of <video> and <audio> isn't exactly that reliable for this).
I'm guessing that older YouTube content may not have the source upload files available... some may be relatively poor quality, or not frequently watched. Re-encoding from the "flash" version of the videos would yield a worse result. Some of this may be from before Google bought YouTube. All speculation of course.
Content wise, YouTube has way more content to convert to be able to take advantage of HTML5. I wonder if Netflix is having to convert video on the backend for this as well. Or if they're just using a base format that allows for delivery over Silverlight and HTML5 without having to re-encode and store. But they wouldn't really be re-encoding on the fly though, would they? That would seem to be hugely resource intensive. Does anyone know more about how they're doing this on the backend?