The specification is a working draft, with the intent to become a W3C recommendation. And it will facilitate advanced streaming use cases such as adaptive streaming, ad-insertion, and even video editing. It will allow VOD, live and time-shifted (DVR) streams to be played back. This will allow player technology to be developed to work across all browsers. Knowledge of several byte stream types:.A JavaScript API to build media streams.This allows the players, through a JavaScript API, to push audio and video into the media tags. While this won’t allow streaming directly to the media tags, it will provide core technology to build browser-independent player technology. The Media Source Extensions (MSE) specification is being drafted to bridge the streaming problem in HTML5. Most people use Flash or Silverlight-based players, but as these technologies are deprecated and browsers move away from plug-in models, an alternative is needed. Some browsers allow streaming using HLS with the HTML5 media tags, but this is non-standard and won’t work in all browsers. Without streaming, features like live streaming, time-shifting, and adaptive bitrate (ABR) are not supported. The streaming limitation is the most critical to Wowza users, and the online video world.

Codec and container support is different between browsers.Difficult to customize controls, especially consistently across browsers.No Digital Rights Management (DRM) or encryption support.HTML5 has come a long way to standardizing audio and video in the browser however, HTML5 audio and video tags still have limitations, including: My colleague, Jamie Sherry, summarized this in a recent blog post. There has been considerable effort to standardize audio and video in the browser through HTML5.

Safari encrypted media extension