For many, the concept of standards brings up images of starting from scratch, a competitive slow-down and endless development hours.

I imagine this is true for many in the online video industry – an industry where the battlefield is fierce and everyone is fervently trying to elbow ahead of their competitors.

However, this hesitation is unfounded and, in truth, short-sighted. Sure, there is huge growth and money to be made in web video now, but without a universal open standard for video platforms, it cannot reach its potential of becoming truly ubiquitous.

Aren’t We Giving Away the Cow for Free?

Developing standards begins as simply as defining what constitutes a video player and openly sharing that definition and source code with the public. Some might find the idea of allowing companies to develop their own custom players cannibalistic to the industry (why would they hire an online video platform provider if they can build it themselves?), but, in reality, the value of online video has little to do with the player.

“the value proposition for online video is not the video player”

Think of it this way – is The New York Times merely pieces of paper? No, it’s only the medium, with the true value coming from the entire mechanism of reporters, editors and printing presses behind it. Comparably, the value proposition for online video is not the video player – it’s the ingestion, syndication, indexing, editing and other parts of the massive infrastructure that supports broadband video.

Akamai and a handful of other companies have bonded to push for an open player standard with the Open Video Player initiative. Their open standard project, while absolutely the right idea, really offers no improvements over the current implied Adobe standard.

What they’re proposing will seemingly result in monolithic and inflexible players, and their espoused method will be mainly applicable to engineers rather than the more important Web developer audience.

Even with a standard in place, 99 percent of companies today (save for NBC and a few others) won’t have the resources to build and incorporate a video platform for their sites in house –and will find it much easier to turn to a video service provider.

Share and Share Alike?

Although important, the player is just one half of the current standardization issue. The way video is shared and syndicated is equally important. As it stands, most players are fed URLs from a content delivery network, but they’re confined to one network because of the lack of standards. There is no way to simply point a player at an RSS feed, yet it should be that easy and could feasibly be that easy.

Although Media RSS has shown some promise in this realm for search engine submissions, it cannot be used with the majority of video players, eliminating it as a potential format to pervasively deliver media content.

If the industry is ever going to reach its potential to enable every single public-facing web site with online video, then there needs to be an agreement among companies like Fliqz, Google, Limelight Networks and countless others that control the video experience to identify and define open standards that everyone supports. 2010 might not be too ambitious of a timeframe to meet this goal.

This was a guest post from Benjamin Wayne, the CEO of Fliqz.com – a leader in full-service, custom, plug-and-play video solutions.

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