Ian Hickson schrieb:
One would imagine that they would happily take new risks if the rewards were great (e.g. a better codec). Sadly the rewards in the case of Ogg Theora are low -- there isn't much content using Theora, and Theora isn't technically an especially compelling codec compared to other contemporary codecs like, say, H.264.
If keeping the web free of IP licensing horrors and being interoperable with as many players as possible (commercial and non-commercial entities, open source or not, free software or not) isn't much of a reason things are looking cheerless for the web indeed.
I don't exactly see why the web should embrace non-free standards just because the big players made the "mistake" of licensing definitely-encumbered formats and are unwilling to "take further risks". (I am aware this is a pretty hard wording and that things aren't quite that easy.)
The old wording was a SHOULD requirement. No MUST. If the big players don't want to take the perceived risk (their decision) they'd still be 100% within the spec. Thus I fail to see why there was need for action.
One way to get a company like Apple to want to take the risk of implementing Theora would be to cause there to be a large pool of existing Theora content out there. Obviously, this presents a bootstrapping problem (aka a "chicken and egg" problem).
In a world where content is served on a per-user basis (streaming, DRM encrypted media files) I don't think this is much of an argument. HTML5 is a future standard which will serve future content.
I think the current wording in the spec is actually biased towards the small players more than the big ones, but if you think it's the other way around then I probably have struck the right balance.
I was specifically thinking of the "additional submarine patent risk for large companies" part. Nobody wants to get struck by a submarine, so either this requirement should be extended to all sort of entities or dropped completely (as its hard by definition to make an informed statement about submarine patents).
Maik
