YouTube and iPhone: Now Compatible

YouTube is playing both sides of the fence now. Despite the fact that Google technically owns the media sharing website, they cannot simply ignore the 1.7 million iPhone users who may or may not be part of the YouTube network (and it is likely that most of them are YouTube users).

Originally, not having HTML5 on YouTube meant that iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad uses would have to use apps to view links that led to videos that were hosted on the video sharing website. Now, there is no need for that. According to the latest update from YouTube, the mobile version of their website will now be using HTML5 as a new standard.

In many ways, this is already predictable. After all, HTML5 really is a great new format for replacing Flash. The only issue is that many existing websites were made, designed and executed using Flash, there is also plenty of web content, such as ads and games that use the Flash format. This has made the shift from Flash to HTML5 a slow one –one that Apple is not happy with.

Several months ago, when Apple released the SDK for the iOS 4, it came with a developer’s agreement that basically ruled out the use of Adobe’s Flash Professional as a creation and compiling tool for iPhone apps. This made it harder for developers to create apps for Apple, and at the same time, it made the Flash developers want to work with Google instead.

Anyway, despite the tension and competition between Apple and Google, the fact that the iPhone 4 sold so much –despite not having Flash support is significant. In some ways, it shows that people simply do not care about what formats are supported or not –and in this regard, whatever format works with Apple’s new device is going to be the new standard.

Tags: Adobe-Flash, Apple, Apple-iPad, Apple-iPhone, Apple-iPhone-4, apps, Google, HTML5, YouTube