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At Google I/O the team showed a demo of YouTube running video right in the browser, instead of in the rectangle of Flash.

Now, that URL takes you to the beta, which you can opt-in too. I am torn on what to write on this showcase though…. so, especially since it is Friday, here are two takes:

Open Web Advocate

It is fantastic to see a massive site – the poster child of Flash video – implement HTML5 video. If you want to piss of an Adobean ask them “how do you feel about YouTube folks making millions off of the back of your work. Surely you got a bunch of license money… oh wait.”

This is the first step for YouTube, and now that video is a native experience in the browser they can innovate in really interesting ways.

One bonus feature for trying the beta: “Videos with ads are not supported”

The Other Guy

It is great to see YouTube showing off HTML5 support, however you will notice that it only works in the Safari/Chrome world (saying it works in IE via ChromeFrame is cheating) due to the fact that YouTube only supports H.264 and hasn’t done Ogg. Sure it would take a lot to get Ogg support at that scale, but it would also help the cause a lot.

When you test it at this early stage you also see that there isn’t HD support or much of the other features of the Flash player, so instead of showing off how the experience can be better….. it is in catch up mode. Features such as full screen aren’t even an option yet of course. We need to move faster.

I am looking forward how things play out over time. What guy are you today?

NOTE: Vimeo are turning on support too, also H.264 only.

Well this is one of my latest projects and I do believe this is an industry that will be the future. CreteNetTV is a channel that is transmitting exclusively on web. All shows are produced by CreteNetTV team and it is trully remarkable to see how creativity can be translated to innovation.

The power of web tv is not only on the fact that you can watch it from your pc. It relies on the fact that viewers can watch on demand videos. This is the true power that soon, to me belief, will be transfered to our conventional TV sets.

www.cretenettv.gr

Design: Sekta
Production: Aventurine
Client: CreteNetTV
Development: Baldpixel
Developers Jargon: well there is not much innovation to this service apart from the fact that a lot of research went through in order to publish the feed with quality and no problems at all. At the beginning Livestream.com was selected as the provider for the stream , but it turned out not to be what the team wanted. LiveStream would be only for live feeds and lucked of the ability to have multiple on demand videos. Instead Akamai was selected through their representative Atoll Impressions . There is not much that I have to say about the innovation of Akamai and their services apart from the fact , that everything is working as it should!

This project would be one of my most complex projects so far, and it took me some time, but finally did it. Northwest Communications as part of their services required an e-commerce site to support their new data center in North Greece (Thessaloniki) .
Greece lucks of data centers and Northwest Communications is slowly growing towards that sector.  Most of hosting providers have their data centers outside greece (e.g. USA or UK). There is a huge number of greek sites that are hosted outside greece since the cost from major hosting providers in Greece is forbidding (and dont get me started for their services). Northwest Communications is breaking that rule and I trully hope that soon they become a major player in this market.

www.northwest.gr

Design: Iordanis Aslanoglou
Production: Aslanoglou -Baldpixel
Client: Northwest Communications
Published: 20/5/2009
Developers Jargon: It has a backoffice that supports multiple users, supports multiple product characteristics , advanced taxonomy and custom views. The most complex task about this site was the integration of ITE (greek hostmaster) and their services . Well not actually the integration between the two systems, but the synchronization of the two. Just imagine that services that run and update domains (Expiration or moving domains between owners ) need to run and synced in northwest.gr also. This is a custom solution from top to bottom and everything that was developed did not include any ready made platforms for integration. The good thing about this project is that a library was developed that is coming soon out for other developers to integrate with the Greek hostmaster.

www.northwest.gr

www.northwest.gr