Sorenson Media surveyed video professionals and discovered that most producers turn to MP4 and the H.264 codec when publishing a video for the web and mobile devices. Sixty-nine percent of respondents use the MP4 format for the web and 58 percent use it for mobile.
MP4 may be the leading file format, but it doesn’t have a lock on the category. Right behind MP4 is Flash video, which is used on the web by 54 percent of respondents and on mobile devices by 16 percent. Flash is lagging on mobile devices because Android is the only platform to support Flash and Adobe has stopped developing the mobile product.
HTML5-based video is the future for mobile devices and the format is now used by 16 percent of respondents. This number is expected to rise as support for HTML5 grows. WebM, Google’s mobile video format, is at the bottom of the survey and used by a low 3 percent of respondents.
The survey revealed that online video is complex and that many respondents use more than one format in their professional work. Peter Csathy, president and CEO of Sorenson Media said, “Standardization in online video is still far from reality, which means doing it right can get extremely complicated. It requires the best work of top professionals who can fully utilize and adapt solutions to the many tasks, tools and processes that make up their video workflows.”
[Sorenson and TechCrunch]