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By providing the best possible user experience across these devices, you can create a positive impression of your organization. But first, you have to ensure your video content is accessible consistently in HTML5 environments.

In the old days, Adobe Flash was all you needed to deliver video to any viewer. But that was before the introduction of the iPhone and iPad. These devices brought HTML5 video front and center for many media publishers and created a landscape of viewers that were now accessing video content across both Flash and HTML5-compatible devices.

But HTML5 also introduces considerable complexity:

• Various smartphones, tablets and connected devices render HTML5 differently depending on the specific version of iOS or Android they are running. This can make for inconsistent playback experiences as well as differences in advertising and analytics behavior.
• Each time a new version of iOS or Android is released, it introduces a new set of requirements to ensure video is delivered appropriately.
• This diversity also makes measurement much more challenging, since you need to be able to account for all of these different operating systems, devices, and platforms to ensure consistent, reliable analytics.
• It also affects how organizations monetize their content, as all of these elements have to be taken into consideration to ensure ads work consistently and they are having the broadest possible impact.

Today, HTML5 video is where Flash video was ten years ago. Flash became the standard for online video largely because of the ecosystem of technologies and solutions that were built around it over time, and now the same thing is occurring with HTML5 video and its fast-growing ecosystem. While this is a positive development for the industry, the issue of ensuring consistent experiences across devices, browsers, and operating systems remains a concern for many publishers. These organizations need to ensure that their HTML5 video content does not break every time Apple or Google releases a new iOS or Android software update, or that they do not need to rewrite plug-ins every time a new version comes out.

At Brightcove, we have invested considerable effort to hide the complexity of the HTML5 video from you and to take these compatibility issues off the table. Our next generation Video Cloud Smart Players are especially tuned for HTML5. Based on an abstraction layer that resolves operating system version and browser compatibility issues on mobile devices, the Smart Players advance the consumer experience of HTML5-based video on iOS and Android devices by creating a consistent, reliable experience. This platform will ensure that business-critical plug-ins and services work regardless of device or the more than a dozen different versions of iOS and Android operating systems in the market today.