OK. I admit. I do not watch “no TV”. I have repeatedly seen episodes of “Kaun Banega Crorepati 3”. Repeatedly, because I was doing a detailed analysis and comparison of the new host Shah Rukh vis-à-vis the old, veteran Mr. Bachchan. Yes, I know that it was proprietary content. But what the hell, I can’t stop myself if they serve it to me on a plate.

With increasing bandwidth, camera phones and the if-Uday-Chopra-can-be-a-hero-then-why-can’t-I mentality of today’s youth, we have loads of videos. So, we have episodes of popular TV series. Complete movies (Okay, pirated), Indie films, interesting TV commercials, marriage videos, show reels of amateur filmmakers and much more. And the more we watch the videos, the more lethargic our Internet connection seems.

The reason for this is that the current Internet browser softwares are not optimized for videos. When the Internet came into existence, the available bandwidth was hardly efficient enough to support videos. So, what we call a tag for video, is not built into the specification of HTML, the default programming language of the Web. Tags are the elements that tell the browsers how to display the data.

So, we do have an image tag built into the specification. All the browsers use this tag. It’s using this that all the images are displayed on any web page. Videos, on the other hand, are displayed, using what are known as plugins. A plugin is a piece of software that you install to enhance the capability of some other software, in this case, web browsers. So, for example, if a website features Flash animation, then you need an Adobe Flash plugin to play it. If a site has video in Real Media format, you need a Real Media plugin and if the video is in Window Media Video format, you, yes, you guessed it, need a Windows Media Player plugin.

Now all these addons do work, but not as smoothly as a built in feature would have worked. Further, to view a wide array of website, the end user has to install numerous plugins. And with new formats like DivX and H.264 coming up, the user’s confusion is only going to pile up. Even the veterans have been releasing newer versions. Microsoft recently released its Silverlight platform for Web animation. And even Adobe came up with the latest version of Flash.

Mozilla, the makers of Firefox and Opera are now working on creating a specification for embedding videos on video sites. The work also includes development and promotion of the open source video format Ogg Theora. The video encoded in Ogg Theora will be directly playable in web browsers thereby freeing users of the hassle of downloading all the three thousand foru hundred and ninety seven plugins. Ok, I exaggerated, but you got the point.

Although The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is said to be working on creating a specification for video on web for HTML, this can take anything between 2-10 years. Standardization is a long process, and the Internet needs an immediate solution. The W3C standard, whenever it comes, may be incompatible with the Mozilla-Opera specification, but I guess, that risk is inherent in the problem. And if Mozilla and Opera succeed in their attempt and can successfully involve some other players too and gain market acceptance, then W3C might just keep their specification as standard.

But I am more interested in seeing how Microsoft reacts to this.

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