Kickstarter has announced that they are moving to HTML5 video and the accompanying <video> tag as a primary means of serving video on their crowdfunding platform.
This is in contrast to their previous approach of relying mainly on Flash video and relying on HTML5 as a fallback. That logic has been inverted, with Flash being supported only for older browsers that don’t support h.264 video.
The move was done with a nod to mobile. Most mobile devices do not support Flash video, and desktop machines need additional software in order to play Flash video. Additionally, Flash has long proven to be a concern for sites that are sensitive to security issues.
Kickstarter explains how they’ve rolled the change out slowly over time on their blog…
For a couple weeks now, we’ve been building up our own HTML5 player. We started serving our new player to people who didn’t have Flash installed, which allowed us to work out the UX and bugs with a small set of users. A few days ago, we enabled the HTML5 player for employees of Kickstarter, widening the user base even more.
We haven’t found the need to use a larger library because the video element specification is so clear and simple to use. Our designers are very skilled in CSS, and we used those skills to design the look and feel of the video player. It is a pleasure to use our core abilities on something that is so core to our site.
Functionally not much changes with the video player, but this should allow Kickstarter to roll out changes to their video player in a more rapid fashion without having to rely on outside consultants. In short, it seems safe to expect a more robust Kickstarter video player in the not-too-distant future.