Nearly everything on the web is open but there is one exception to this, writes Christopher Blizzard of the Mozilla Foundation: “There’s one exception to this: video on the web.”

He explains how Firefox developments my disintermediate YouTube:

“Although videos are available on the web via sites like youtube, they don’t share the same democratized characteristics that have made the web vibrant and distributed. And it shows. That centralization has created some interesting problems that have symptoms like censorship via abuse of the DMCA and an overly-concentrated audience on a few sites that have the resources and technology to host video. I believe that problems like the ones we see with youtube are a symptom of the larger problem of the lack of decentralization and competition in video technology – very different than where the rest of the web is today.

In my mind there are two things that help drive that kind of decentralization:

* You should be able to easily understand how something moves from a computer-readable format to something that is presented to a user. For example, turning HTML into a document, turning a JPEG file into a picture on the screen or using HTTP to download a file.

* You must be able to implement and deliver that technology without requiring anyone’s permission or license. In reality this means that it should be available on a royalty-free basis and without encumbered documentation.

In the video world, there are some formats that fit the first quality: Some formats are documented, understood and even widely deployed. But more often than not they are subject to to per-unit royalties, large up-front fees and creating content in those formats (the encoders) are often so expensive as to be prohibitive to all but only the deepest-pocketed corporations or well-funded startups. And there are very few video formats that meet the second. This is not the kind of decentralization that made the web thrive. It is quite the opposite.

So now we get to the Mozilla part of this story: what we’re doing about this.

* In Firefox 3.1 we’re including support for the OGG container format with the Theora video and Vorbis audio codecs for the

* We’re also supporting the development of open video with a grant of $100,000 (USD) grant that will be administered by the Wikimedia Foundation to develop and support Theora. You should expect to see some really great stuff coming out of that funding. That work will make its way back into Firefox as well.

* The other thing we’re able to do is to make video a first class citizen on the web. This means we can do things with video and let it interact with other types of content (SVG, Canvas, HTML) in ways that haven’t been possible to date. We hope that by releasing video from the plugin prison and letting it play nice with others we’ll be able to open up a new wave of creativity around video. But more on that in another post.”