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Apple TV and YouTube: Not all Flash - May 31, 2007

As usual, Apple’s master showman Steve Jobs has managed to create tremendous buzz by announcing that Apple will shortly begin doing something others are already doing. This time it involves streaming YouTube videos to a TV set via Apple TV.

There are, of course, lots of ways to get YouTube to the boob tube. Pretty much any media center PC will do the trick, as will Internet-connected set-top boxes that support Flash and have some ability to navigate.

The fact that Google would partner with Apple was also pretty much a foregone conclusion; Apple-ites have been expecting it at least since Google CEO Eric Schmidt joined Apple’s board of directors last year.

But you can’t blame Jobs for dishing out the hype if the rest of us keep lapping it up. And there was some actual news in today’s announcement, just not the stuff that grabbed the headlines.

Perhaps most significantly, YouTube is converting its entire catalog of videos to the MPEG 4-based H.264 codec to be compatible with Apple TV. That could signal a more general shift in the works at YouTube from its current reliance on Flash video to high-quality encodings.

Flash has the advantage of ease of use and near-universal support among PCs and Macs, but it achieves its ubiquity in part by sacrificing quality.

YouTube videos look like crap on a PC screen and they’ll look even worse blown up to a TV. If the TV set is going to be a big part of YouTube’s future, it’s going to have to improve quality significantly.

That, of course, raises the stakes for content owners. The studios and networks may wail now about YouTube’s reluctance to filter copyrighted content from its site, but at least the content is confined to crappy looking video on a small screen.

An increase in quality and access to a TV screen would likely increase the temptation to post unlicensed, professionally produced content on YouTube.

One the other hand, the Google/Apple alliance may some day prove to be content owners’ best counterweight to a world of IP-delivered video based on a Microsoft operating system.

Having more than one platform available for delivering video over the Internet is in content owners’ long-term interests. And the more video moving around out there now on a non-Microsoft platform—even if it has no immediate commercial value—increases the odds of having a multi-polar world when it counts.

Getting there could be painful, though.

 

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