Cisco updated their Visual Networking Index, providing very interesting information regarding the broadband usage.

As could have been expected, the VNI continues to focus on video as a significant game changer in broadband traffic. As stated in the VNI “The most striking shift in application mix trends continues to be the growth of video as a percentage of traffic compared to P2P file sharing”.

Video related highlights are therefore:

• Peer-to-peer has been surpassed by online video as the largest category. The subset of video that includes streaming video, flash, and Internet TV represents 26 percent, compared to 25 percent for P2P
• Over one-third of the top 50 sites by volume are video sites. There is a high degree of diversity among the video sites in the top 50, including video viewed on gaming consoles, Internet TV, short-form user-generated video, commercial video downloads, and video distributed via content delivery networks (CDNs). Video sites appeared more frequently than any other type of site in the top 50.
• Contrary to popular belief, none of the top 50 global web sites (by traffic volume) featured explicit adult content. This represents a shift in content compared to the composition of top global web sites two years ago
• Online video fluctuates more than file sharing traffic. Online video’s volatility (defined as the spread of traffic volume during the course of the day) is 51 percent higher than that of file sharing. The peak video hour is 91 percent higher than the average video hour, while the peak file sharing hour is 64 percent higher than the average file sharing hour.

As the graph below shows, the top 50 sites in terms of traffic volume (globally) are dominated by online video, followed by software downloads and updates.

HTML5 came to the world with high expectations of being a game-changer by including features like video playback and drag-and-drop that have been previously dependent on third-party browser plug-ins such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.

But in order to succeed, implementations and specifications have to do a delicate dance together. On one hand you don’t want implementations to happen before the specification is finished, because people start depending on the details of implementations and that constrains the specification, but on the other hand you also do not want the specification to be finished before there are implementations and author experience with those implementations, because you need the feedback…

In the current stage of the dance it seems that implementations will have to wait for the specifications to lead.

“The problem we’re facing right now is there is already a lot of excitement for HTML5, but it’s a little too early to deploy it because we’re running into interoperability issues,” including differences between video on devices, said the official, Philippe Le Hegaret, W3C interaction domain leader.

HTML5 should work across browsers; however this is currently not the case. HTML5-based applications can be deployed when there is a rendering engine acing on the server side.  This is not the case in “open web” where interoperability is a must.

Furthermore, HTML5 lacks a standard video codec, and it is not likely to change in the upcoming specification.

DRM (Digital rights management) is not supported in HTML5 as well. As HTML5 is an open standard, any solution for DRM will be hacked in no time. This means some video producers will not deploy their videos in HTML5 without this type of protection, he said.

HTML5 final approval is due in two to three years.

Till then though “iPad features Safari, a mobile web browser that supports the latest web standards — including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript” as stated in Apple’s iPad website it seems that “HTML5 compared to Flash is like a hat compared to an umbrella. They can be used together, but a hat won’t replace an umbrella” . Well, at least not for now…