CHICAGO – Pete Kocks, chief architect of AOL Video and of AOL’s video search portal Truveo knows online video.
It’s a mass of various encoding techniques and metadata issues and myriad other technical challenges. But, he told the IPTV World conference in Chicago on Wednesday that there may be a de facto standard emerging thanks to the Apple iPhone/
“Everyone with a major video site wants to make their content available on the iPhone,” he said. The iPhone is “ridiculously popular” and its buyers are “desirable consumers,” said Kocks.
Video is so much more important on the iPhone than on other mobiles that “they’ve really changed the game,” he added.
So, if content companies want to be on the iPhone, it has to be encoded to Apple’s H.264 standard and for progressive download and that is what Kocks is beginning to see video purveyors concentrating on now.
“From IPTV perspective, all of a sudden, there’s a standard for how to stream video that’s not embedded in a web page,” he explained.
– Greg O’Brien
