Adobe Systems Incorporated (ADBE), Google Inc (GOOGL): YouTube Now Defaults To HTML5 In Select Browsers Dealing Major Blow To Flash

Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ:ADBE)’s Flash has been dealt a bad card with Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s YouTube team making the video streaming site default to HTML5 video on some select browsers.

In a post on the YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) said that advances with HTML5 video has enabled them to supplant Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ:ADBE)’s Flash as the default in “Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8 and in beta versions of Firefox”.

The most critical factor that lead to Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ:ADBE)’s Flash losing its default status for those select videos, the YouTube team said, was the support for Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) which the Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) team uses to “show you more videos with less buffering,” in layman’s terms.

According to YouTube Engineering Manager Richard Leider, ABR has reduced buffering by more than half globally and up to 80% in very congested networks.

HTML5 benefit will also be seen in smart TVs, Leider writes, as the standard is also used in those machines.

The Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) manager said that part of the benefits of HTML5 as default video option for YouTube was the ability to use VP9 codec which gives viewers higher-quality videos at 35% reduction in bandwidth consumption. Other benefits includes using a single player for content protection across different platforms, Leider notes.

By the end of September, Jeffrey Ubben’s ValueAct Capital was the largest institutional investor in Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ:ADBE) with a stake comprised of about 23.86 million shares. Stanley Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Capital owned 166,810 Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Class A shares by the end of the same month.