That’s what Google did today, announcing that its Chrome browser will ship without native support for H.264, the video specification on which the Web is arguably standardized (certainly it’s the one prefered by folks like Apple and Microsoft). Instead it will support WebM, Google’s open-source, royalty-free codec, and Theora, another open compression developed by the Xiph.org Foundation.

“We are changing Chrome’s HTML5 video support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project,” Google said in a post to the Chromium blog. “Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.”

A ballsy move on Google’s part and one that will certainly spark off the video codec contretemps once more. Sadly, it’s going to make the the HTML 5 transition even more messy than it already is. Right now, video can be encoded in H.264 and served up to pretty much any browser or mobile platform–using a Flash wrapper if necessary. But once Google ends support for H.264, video producers will have to encode their content a second time to play natively in Chrome.

Which seems unfortunate. Particularly because Google is billing its decision as a move to free, open standards and away from proprietary ones like H.264 that must be licensed. By ending support for H.264, Google is actually encumbering video producers with additional costs. Said SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill, “I’m left with two choices: Gulp and double my costs on an unknown tech, or return to Flash as primary solution. Ugh. Thanks, Google.”

But Flash isn’t free and open standard, either. If Google’s goal is to “enable open innovation” shouldn’t it be dumping Flash from Chrome as well? Evidently, that’s not part of the master plan which includes Adobe as a WebM partner …

PREVIOUSLY:

• Google’s “Royalty-Free” WebM Video May Not Be Royalty-Free for Long
• Google Open Sources VP8 Video Codec. Will Apple, Microsoft and Intel Use It?

“The world would have a new free format unencumbered by software patents,” the Free Software Foundation enthused in an open letter to Google (GOOG) earlier this year. “Viewers, video creators, free software developers, hardware makers–everyone–would have another way to distribute video without patents, fees, and restrictions.”

A new era of Web video without the patent-encumbered formats that have defined the Internet to date. That seems ideal. But like many ideals, it may prove to be unattainable. As a number of observers have already noted VP8 isn’t free from patent liability. And now that Google has open-sourced it as part of WebM, that liability is likely to become an issue.

And quickly, too.

Indeed, Larry Horn, CEO of MPEG LA, the consortium that controls the AVC/H.264 video standard, tells me that the group is already looking at creating a patent pool license for VP8. Here’s an excerpt from my email exchange with him:

JP: Let me ask you this: Are you creating a patent pool license for VP8 and WebM? Have you been approached about creating one?

Larry Horn: Yes, in view of the marketplace uncertainties regarding patent licensing needs for such technologies, there have been expressions of interest from the market urging us to facilitate formation of licenses that would address the market’s need for a convenient one-stop marketplace alternative to negotiating separate licenses with individual patent holders in accessing essential patent rights for VP8 as well as other codecs, and we are looking into the prospects of doing so.

It would seem, then, that VP8 may end up subject to the same licensing issues as H.264. If MPEG LA does create a patent pool license for the standard, the free lunch Google promised yesterday may not be free after all.

Google certainly has the market muscle to guarantee broad acceptance of WebM and the VP8 codec–if it’s a royalty-free standard. But what if it’s not truly royalty free? Who’ll foot the bill? And is the company willing to indemnify its partners from patent litigation to push WebM?

For what it’s worth, Google seems to believe that it has done its due diligence here and has the necessary patent clearance for VP8. Said Google product manager Mike Jazayeri: “We have done a pretty thorough analysis of VP8 and On2 Technologies (VP8′s developer) prior to the acquisition and since then, and we are very confident with the technology and that’s why we’re open sourcing.”

Question is, was that analysis thorough enough?

I’ve asked Google for comment on Horn’s remarks and will update here if I’m given one.

On Thursday, Adobe co-founders and co-chairmen Chuck Geschke and John Warnock followed suit with some thoughts of their own. Their eight-paragraph essay, “Our Thoughts On Open Markets,” mentions Apple only once, but when it does, it is to lambaste the company for its position on Flash, a position the two claim “could undermine this next chapter of the web–the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time.”

I spoke to Geschke Thursday afternoon about the pair’s letter, Adobe’s (ADBE) new “We ? Apple” ad campaign and Apple’s (AAPL) stance on his company’s software. Below, a transcript of our conversation.

John Paczkowski: What is Adobe is hoping to get out of this new “We Love Apple/Freedom of Choice” campaign?

Chuck Geschke: We mostly are using it as a way to communicate with our customers and partners to assure them that we’re not going to change our strategy and to inform the rest of the community of what the pluses and minuses are of not supporting Flash on the iPhone and the iPad. Our customers, a large percentage of them, are the people who generate and distribute information and content, and for them they have one production stream that they use to do that and they’ve gotten used to the fact that we’ve worked very hard to open up the standards that we support so that we can offer them ubiquity of output on all kinds of platforms. So the fact that Apple is precluding that puts them in a tough position because it means that they’re going to have to create that content twice, and that’s not very productive. It’s certainly more expensive than what they do today. And as you know, the content industry is an industry under a lot of cost pressure these days.

JP: Both Apple and Microsoft have said publicly now that Flash has issues with reliability, security, and performance. Do you think those complaints are legitimate?

CG: I think they’re old news. Go to our Web site and read the actual facts about Flash. We enumerate the facts about Flash there as we see them. [Microsoft and Apple] may have a different set of facts that they believe are accurate. It’s up to you to decide. But I will tell you that the Flash version we’re coming out with now–where, for the first time with the Mac platform, we can actually get to the lower-level interfaces–is going to run like the wind. And the same is true on Windows.

JP: Shouldn’t Apple have the right to define the means by which apps for its own platform can be written?

CG: They absolutely have the right. No one says they don’t.

JP: Cross-platform mobile apps tend not to take advantage of native features unique to each device. What do you have to say about complaints that write-once-run-anywhere software results in subpar apps?

CG: Well, people don’t say that about Photoshop. They certainly don’t say it about Acrobat….I’m a little confused about what the real examples of that are. If there’s a problem with the performance of Flash as demonstrated on the iPhone, it’s because we haven’t been able to access the inner layers of hardware and software we need to to provide the kind of performance we can provide on other platforms. But that’s Apple’s choice, not ours. And now, of course, you can’t use it at all.

JP: So you don’t think write-once-run-anywhere is limiting at all?

CG: Not really. I mean there may be certain features in certain environments that you’ll want to do customization for, but the more you go down that road, the more you get the experience of HTML on the Web, where the kind of browser, hardware and OS you use determines what your experience. That’s because HTML is not well codified and standardized and people sort of roll their own.

JP: How much of Adobe’s revenue comes from Flash?

CG: I would share that number if we disclose it, but I’m not sure that we do. It isn’t a huge amount of revenue, but it is an extremely popular platform that all of our apps have the opportunity to exploit when it’s distributed everywhere. Flash tools aren’t the largest piece of our business, but it’s a significant one and obviously we feel it’s extremely important to our customers and partners who want to build third-party apps in an environment where they can, in fact, put them on a variety of devices without having to re-implement them.

JP: So could Apple’s exclusion of Flash hurt Adobe sales?

CG: I don’t think it will have a significant effect. As well as Apple is doing, if you look at the number of platforms out in the market and the number of release of new ones that will occur over the next six to 12 months, it’s going to be huge. That’s a much bigger population, and we’re just focusing on making our technology operate as effectively and efficiently as possible for it.

JP: In his “Thoughts on Flash” essay, Jobs accused Adobe of abandoning Apple. “Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products,” he wrote. Is Job’s implication here a fair one?

CG: We never abandoned Apple. Apple now seems to be abandoning at least one aspect of our product line right now. No, we never abandoned them. We’ve always ported our apps simultaneously to both platforms. There have been times when Apple has changed its strategy on hardware or on operating systems that didn’t meet our product cycle, so there have been periods of maybe six months where we didn’t keep up with their latest release. But that’s our own business model; we can only afford to re-implement our products at a certain rate.

We have never, ever abandoned Apple and we don’t want to abandon them today. Everything you read in our new ad is true. I myself own probably between 8 and 10 Macintoshes — both laptops and work stations. I don’t buy PCs, I buy Macs.

JP: Why isn’t Flash an open standard?

CG: It is. What are you talking about?

JP: Flash is proprietary to Adobe. It’s not Open Source. Let me rephrase: Why isn’t Flash an open standard overseen by an open-standards body?

CG: As soon as Adobe acquired Macromedia, we openly published the SWF format and removed the requirement that you have a license to use it….No, we haven’t put Flash out to a standards body yet as we have with PDF and Postscript. But I wouldn’t be shocked if we do someday when it makes sense.

With the standards that we have built and made open to the entire world, we’ve tried our best to get them to the point where they’re mature enough so that we’re not doing design by committee. If you look at the amount of time it will take HTML5 to become a reasonably solid platform, it’s going to take a long time because there are an awful lot of vested interests trying to influence its development.

JP: Any thoughts on Steve Jobs’s claim that “Flash was created during the PC era–for PCs and mice”?

CG: What do you think an iPhone is? It’s a personal computer.

JP: One last question. What do you think of the iPad?

CG: I think it’s a neat thing. I personally have no particular interest in it; I’d much rather have a general-purpose computer. I think there’s definitely a market for that kind of product. We certainly know a lot of people that want to produce content for it and a large percentage of them are disappointed that they’re going to have to do that separately from the way they produce content for all the other devices they support.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Adobe to Apple: You Wanna Hug It Out? Let’s Hug It Out!
• Good Luck With That Alleged Antitrust Complaint Against Apple, Adobe…
• Adobe CTO: Flash on iPhone Doesn’t Suck and Apple Knows It
• A Possible Apple Antitrust Inquiry? Nothing to See Here…
• Microsoft on Flash: What Steve Said
• Adobe: We’re Done With You Too, Apple
• Apple to Adobe: I Know You Are, but What Am I?
• So Much for Flash on the iPhone
• Adobe: Flash for Mac Is Getting Better–Really!

An industry executive said to be familiar with the company’s plans tells Multichannel News that Netflix plans to extend its Watch Instantly video-streaming service to the Nintendo Wii and to the iPhone and iPod touch as well.

It’s not entirely clear how the company plans to bring Watch Instantly to the iPhone. Presumably, it will use a native iPhone app, since the device doesn’t support Silverlight, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Flash-esque also-ran.

That said, there are some hurdles to negotiate there since native video streaming on iPhone 3.0 doesn’t yet support digital rights management.

Another issue likely to prove problematic: Bandwidth. Watch Instantly streaming typically requires a fair bit of bandwidth and might prove problematic over 3G connections. AT&T (T), which hobbled SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone over bandwidth concerns, will probably see things that way. Which means Netflix’s app, if it is indeed in development, will be limited to Wi-Fi like the SlingPlayer.

Beyond that and the DRM issue, there’s not much more I can think of to prevent such an app from being brought to the iPhone. There’s not much overlapping content between Watch Instantly and Apple’s iTunes service. And even if there was, there’s no real rivalry here that might inspire Apple to block Netflix’s (NFLX) service. iTunes is run pretty much at break-even to support sales of Apple (AAPL) devices. And a Netflix app for iPhone would arguably help Apple do that as well.

An industry executive said to be familiar with the company’s plans tells Multichannel News that Netflix plans to extend its Watch Instantly video-streaming service to the Nintendo Wii and to the iPhone and iPod touch as well.

It’s not entirely clear how the company plans to bring Watch Instantly to the iPhone. Presumably, it will use a native iPhone app, since the device doesn’t support Silverlight, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Flash-esque also-ran.

That said, there are some hurdles to negotiate there since native video streaming on iPhone 3.0 doesn’t yet support digital rights management.

Another issue likely to prove problematic: Bandwidth. Watch Instantly streaming typically requires a fair bit of bandwidth and might prove problematic over 3G connections. AT&T (T), which hobbled SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone over bandwidth concerns, will probably see things that way. Which means Netflix’s app, if it is indeed in development, will be limited to Wi-Fi like the SlingPlayer.

Beyond that and the DRM issue, there’s not much more I can think of to prevent such an app from being brought to the iPhone. There’s not much overlapping content between Watch Instantly and Apple’s iTunes service. And even if there was, there’s no real rivalry here that might inspire Apple to block Netflix’s (NFLX) service. iTunes is run pretty much at break-even to support sales of Apple (AAPL) devices. And a Netflix app for iPhone would arguably help Apple do that as well.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is going to turn the social network’s “stream” of user experiences and information into a revenue stream one way or another. And if that means allowing others to pan its waters for gold, then so be it.

And so, at an event in Palo Alto later today, Facebook will reportedly announce plans to open its stream to third-party developers, offering them the chance to build new services and applications outside the site that–with users’ permission–access the status updates, photos and videos uploaded by users. According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook will provide that access via an open standard and it will do it for free.

An attractive proposition for developers: Access to a community with some 200 million members where the only real barrier to entry is a user’s privacy settings. In the months ahead, we’ll undoubtedly see this give rise to countless new services in much the same way Twitter has spawned an ecosystem of developers.

In doing this, Facebook is positioning itself as a social data clearinghouse feeding a myriad of other third-party services. More importantly, by doing so, the social-networking behemoth is also acknowledging that we’re not likely to conduct all our social interactions in a single network.

But it’s also betting that we may be willing to conduct many of them through one. And in the end, that’s just as good–especially if that social network is Facebook.

UPDATE:

Moments ago Facebook announced the Open Stream API which will allow third party developers to create new apps and services that will allow users to read an interact with Facebook member streams without having to actually visit Facebook.

“The stream is the flow of information on Facebook, which manifests itself on a user’s home page as the News Feed and on the user’s profile as the Wall,” Facebook explains in its developer Wiki. “It represents the content a user shares with friends in a real-time setting. Initially the stream content appeared only on Facebook, and now with the Open Stream API, developers can connect to their users’ streams and let their users read their streams wherever they want. This means that for the first time, you can build new user interfaces for the stream everywhere including Web, mobile, and desktop applications.”

A bold move. And one that will almost certainly let some of the steam out of Twitter’s pistons.