Working at an online-advertising company that specializes in video, I’ve been getting the question quite often lately: “well, what about HTML 5?

There are two things holding most people back from full adoption of HTML 5 video. The first one is its lack of support for DRM (Digital Rights Management). The reason this is important is that without DRM, your video content can be downloaded and distributed across the internet. At Joost.com, we have a sophisticated DRM setup for our videos to make sure that our content providers know their content is secure and can’t be pirated. Until we see DRM, most video sites will stay clear of HTML 5 all together.

The second, and probably most important, is the lack of browser support. Our friends at Microsoft are once again attempting to keep the web-world down by not supporting HTML 5. Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are all HTML 5 compliant, but it’s that darn Internet Explorer that once again is stopping people from building HTML 5 sites. IE 8 can’t support HTML 5 at all, while the new IE 9 BETA partially supports HTML 5. There is some good news however, it seems that fewer people are actually using Internet Explorer!

For the first time in October, Internet Explorer usage fell below 30% of all browsers across the web. This is a HUGE milestone considering just a few years ago, it was in the 80% range. This clearly shows that IE is on the decline big time and that people are finally finding out how terrible Internet Explorer is.

The bottom line is while HTML 5 is exciting, we are probably three years from really seeing a growth in adoption across the web. If we could either get Microsoft on board or ban all usage of Internet Explorer (my choice), then I think we could see it happen much quicker.