Facebook Starts HTML5 video [Updated]

RT @goSimian: Facebook Starts Serving iPad-Friendly Video http://bit.ly/98st45

About the time the iPhone and iTouch were released without Flash support I had a series of email exchanges with a friend in Australia, who is something of a Flash fan. I predicted that the rise of the iPhone would make it imperative that a video service – any site serving up video – couldn’t afford to ignore the iPhone/iTouch (and now iPad) market.

Now at 80 million devices we’re seeing exactly that happen, with Facebook now joining the HTML5 camp for iPad et al support.

[Update] The definitive word: it’s H.264 MP4 using the standard player in Safari Mobile. From Techcrunch

Yes, videos on Facebook do play when clicked on from the iPad or iPhone, but only ReadWriteWebnoted that this was through an h264 player (which both the iPhone and iPad have always supported), and not actually any sort of HTML5 implimentation. We’ve since confirmed this with Facebook which says, “You are correct, this is not html 5. All new videos are encoded in h264 format, so we’re playing videos natively in the iPad since it supports h264-encoded videos.”

The distinction is the non-use of the <video> tag, otherwise that’s an HTML5 video! As I said in the comments, not being HTML5 at this point is probably a mistake, or simply not enough time.