I wasn't aware of that, what format does Google use for its live streams?
I know that YouTube on Chrome uses VP9, which is not a web standard - or at least not more of a web standard than HTTP Live Streaming (which is what Apple uses for its keynote).
You're right, I am legitimately confused. If there are no web standard video encodings, is it therefore wrong to say that "Google uses web standards for their video?" What exactly is Google doing better?
YouTube uses MPEG-DASH as its adaptive streaming protocol, which works over standard web protocols with royalty free codecs and containers, unlike HLS.
As for why there isn't a web standard video encoding and container, all the major browser vendors except one have announced support for VP9 and its successor and Webm.
I get that you don't want to use Safari, but actually "forcing us to use Safari" is exactly what Google did. Google chose not to implement HTTP Live Streaming, and therefore it's not available in Chrome. Microsoft made the other choice, which is why it works in Edge.
The double standard here is really quite breathtaking. Apple doesn't implement a feature: Apple's fault. Google doesn't implement a feature: Apple's fault too.
HLS requires the MPEG2-TS container format, which is not royalty free and therefore has no chance of becoming a web standard or of being implemented by Mozilla on free platforms.
I don't see the double standard. All but one browser on GP's platform support the royalty free option. Only Safari on his platform supports the encumbered option, and he doesn't want to be forced to use it. On my own preferred platform, no browsers support HLS.
Since the votes on this thread won't let me reply:
@pjmlp: I choose to use a platform where developer experience is the primary goal because developing software is both my vocation and avocation and why I am reading "Hacker News." If I wanted a walled garden media consumption toy, I would get a LeapPad. Look, we can snark all day, but that doesn't change the conclusion that tommoor was right about web standards.
@millstone: There are no royalty-required formats that are web standards for a reason: to make the web free and open to all. That is why it is not a red herring. Bringing Google into it, on the other hand, is — whether Google pays the fees has no bearing on whether the format should be a web standard. Apple chose not to implement hardware decoding for the unencumbered format. All other major consumer hardware manufacturers have.
Not that I like HLS even a tiny bit, but even if MPEG2-TS was patent encumbered (and I'm not sure it is) HLS now supports fragmented MP4 just like DASH (this was done so that content providers don't need to store two different muxings of the video for DASH and HLS).
Apple, as usual, wrote their own private format. A pretty sucky one at that. But don't get fooled, DASH is not much better, and for the few things it offers over HLS it comes with a massive implementation difficulty. There is basically no DASH compliant player around, not even the one developed by the DASH Industry Forum implements all the standard. It would be way easier for every browser vendor to support HLS than DASH.
"Royalty free" seems like a red herring. I'm not familiar with MPEG2-TS in particular, but Chrome already happily plays H.264 on macOS, plus there is an explicit exception in H.264 license for non-paid (including ad-supported) content. I don't see how implementing HLS would increase Google's licensing cost in any way.
I appreciate the free software position. It seems MPEG-DASH is indeed better suited for it, though maybe only slightly [1]. (Regardless, turns out Apple did not release anything as copyleft this year, so maybe it's better that free software purists could not have watched the video?)
The case for "encumbered" options is simple: it's what's decoded in hardware, for users who prefer their device to last the entire video.
If Apple used fMP4 for this video, that gives them no excuse not to support other browsers. They can just ship a JavaScript HLS client built on the MSE web standard on the web page.
It is a Apple developer conference for software developers that care about making beautiful applications that take full advantage of native experiences on Apple platforms.
Any developer on this community can watch the video.
I can still be an outsider and be genuinely interested in what their platform has to offer and, maybe, later decide that I want to invest in their platform. I become a better developer, Apple gains a new developer, everyone wins.
Forcing people to use macOS to view recorded sessions or events goes against that.
However, the default experience is a little box that says "Streaming is available in Safari and the WWDC app". Now I have to go out of my way to learn that they stream via HLS, obtain the stream's URL and feed it to VLC. †
Compare this with Microsoft's and Google's videos (available through Channel9 and YouTube, respectively) that are accessible "virtually" from every operating system and device.
If your goal is to attract new developers to the platform, maybe adopting a more widespread industry standard (such as DASH, which all other browsers implement) is probably the way to go, IMO.
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† By the way, the box also breaks the "Copy Video Location" menu item, so I have to open the inspector or install an extension to find out what the real URL is.
It does seem like a lost opportunity to do some outreach though. It's not hard to provide streams both in HLS and DASH, and streaming the developer conference to everyone could surely attract new developers to their platform (and not only developers, the same thing applies to presentations of new devices and consumer software).
To me it really looks like a statement against people without macs; Apple doesn't care about them, not even in its own interest of making money. They won't speak to you as long as you don't have an iDevice, full stop.
All computer ecosystems up to the late 90's were like that, the only thing special about Apple is that they are the surviving ones from those days.
It were IBM "mistakes" that made the PC different from all other computer eco-systems, however the current trends of commodity hardware and race to bottom prices are making PC OEMs go back to the 80-90's full integration of hardware/software culture.
