Like Bonjour, I really don't understand why other companies don't adopt these open standards. They don't benefit Apple particularly. It's not like Apple has some competitive advantage in HTTP Live Streaming. Meanwhile these competitors rush to copy everything else Apple does.
Frankly, I think its appalling that youtube, for instance, is still running on flash. How many years ago did they first trial MP4 streaming? Why I can't I access all the videos over MP4?
Why would you want your browser to be bad at streaming video?
> Frankly, I think its appalling that youtube, for instance, is still running on flash.
Everyone can turn on HTML5 for YouTube if they wish. They offer both. They give you the choice, the default is Flash (but Flash still has the widest support on older platforms).
> Why I can't I access all the videos over MP4?
Because people would have to pay licensing fees several times for the same stream (e.g. sender and receiver both have to pay $$$, sometimes the sender, browser vendor AND OS vendor have to pay $$$).
> Meanwhile these competitors rush to copy everything else Apple does.
And Apple copies everything their competitors do also. Just look at iOS 8, that was just copying some of the best features from their competition (not that I blame them, they were right to do so).
The new keyboard (Android), third party keyboards (Android), "Handoff" (everyone else), Spotlight web-search (everyone else), etc.
Apple hasn't done anything original since Jobs died.
I turned on HTML5 video for youtube and I still have this problem, because they don't encode all videos in MP4.
> Because people would have to pay licensing fees several times for the same stream
Many groups have spoken out about the licensing issues with pictures, video, and audio. That's what has created this mess.
I think that honor befalls the ITU with their H.261. It's only a few years difference and it definitely was never as wide spread as Quicktime but that's the first format that I remember that actually worked. It never succeeded on the web though there were a couple of companies that tried to do this using so called browser plug-ins.
Live streaming is mostly the domain of RTMP these days, HTTP doesn't lend itself well to live (but works just fine for streaming stored content).
As for why browsers don't all do MP4, you could ask why browsers do not natively support RTMP, that would solve the whole problem in one go.
Yes, several years ago, I was getting MP4 video, and today, a portion (say %30-%40) just launch with MP4. But most of the time I get the "you need flash".
Twitch, Google Hangouts, any "live" sport event what protocol/technology do they use ?
A mix of HLS and flash ?
HLS is nice because it doesn't require any new servers or protocols -- it uses vanilla HTTP, and can be served up by basically any web server. As a result, it's much easier to make it work with a CDN.
I guess the reason of having such poor support outside Apple browsers, despite the benefits, has to do with licensing issues and the complications of embedding ads, as someone pointed out.
Here's the reality of video, and this goes for a lot of things that Apple makes "simple and beautiful". They fundamentally aren't. Video is a fundamentally difficult mess, a PITA, and the only way to have it work really smoothly is to have enough control over the entire stack to ensure that things work they way they are supposed to... and even then it doesn't always work. People adopting MP4 as a standard has gone a long way towards making things "just work" generally, but it's not sufficient by itself for a quality live stream.
I remember trying to watch a previous live stream from south america and the difficulties I had, even though I was using Apple devices and software the whole way.
Simple and Beautiful is a contradiction from "everywhere out of the box".
Those are two opposite goals.
This is an important thing to understand about software broadly, but with video it borders on impossible.
The better answer is probably: "They simply don't care". No ifs and buts. Probably making it a bit exclusive and hard to get to only adheres to their marketing philosophy.
Why would they only allow already-customers to watch their presentation?
Locking out non-customers seems not the best way to get some.