> Apple has a fantastic track record of making Safari a world class web browser

From a quick glance it looks behind Firefox and Chrome on HTML/CSS/JS feature support.

https://caniuse.com/?compare=firefox+84,chrome+89,safari+14&...

And then there's Safari's broken autocomplete:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23646158

I'm not sure how iOS can be considered a bastion for the web when it doesn't even have WebM support, which has been used across the web for years.

And yet video streaming in Safari seems to work fine for users, and better still, it leverages the native hardware decoding capabilities to minimize battery usage.

WebM is widespread, royalty free media format that's hardware accelerated with zero cost license.

The reason non-WebM stream services might work on Safari is because said service engineers implemented alternatives to it.

Right. My point is, the WebM solution was not needed to fulfill customer demand (just like Flash turned out not to be needed either). Customer demand isn't "give me WebM" - it's "give me high quality video in my mobile browser that doesn't kill my battery."

There is wisdom sometimes in saying "no."

There is no wisdom in comparing WebM to flash. They couldn't be further appart in various aspects. For one, WebM is hardware accelerated whilst flash wasn't.

There's also no wisdom in Safari preventing users from viewing a widespread royalty free media format. It simply causes frustration which is evidenced by the many frustrated customers in results for "safari stream not working "webm"" search.

How do you know that the iPhone and iPad hardware have the IP core for performing hardware decoding of WebM formats? And how many such searches are actually taking place relative to the number of successful video views?

They obviously don't have the decoder because Apple didn't implement them.

I think you're ignoring other aspects of that kind of decision-making. Yes, the feature here is "power efficient, high quality mobile video streaming", but consider that content producers have to encode, store, and serve multiple different formats (plus more licensing fees for the encoders) in order to serve all their users. That's incredibly wasteful and causes people all sorts of headaches on the backend. Both Apple's stuff and WebM do indeed satisfy the user-facing feature requirements, but Apple could have just used WebM and saved content producers a lot of time and money (which often -- but admittedly not always -- translates into saving end-customers money as well).

There's of course a balance to be maintained; if we single-source our streaming video codecs, that will dampen innovation in that space. But I'd hope there's a less wasteful middle ground than the place we're at now.

HLS and H.264 are by far the most popular streaming technologies according to a 2019 survey. If anything, I’d say Apple made the smart bet, and that WebM is the real distraction for content delivery providers.

Technology license cost is not the only consideration that goes into business decisions. Consider the whole end to end process of making, distributing and consuming video, and all the parties and technology providers involved, not to mention installed bases, cost of switching, etc.

That’s literally only because Amazon worked with them to introduce the needed features so they could launch Luna. Controller support was shoddy before iOS14, for example, so the web app approach wasn’t viable for xCloud or Stadia.