[jakubriedl]

After working in video streaming company for several years and writing web player (on top of vjs & shaka) used by millions of users every month I both agree and disagree with the article at the same time.

Streaming video is too hard, 100% agree with that, but <video/> element is the reason nor the biggest problem. Biggest pain in my opinion is DRM. That is huge pain in the ass which is poorly standardised (getting better but still) and is constantly broken. Second is transcoding, which is hard because it is hugely complicated problem. Even after the years I don’t feel I understand more than 10% of what is going on. Luckily there are companies like Bitmovin and Mux that can help with those 2. Distribution of the video is easier with modern CDNs, it’s just insanely expensive. Where we could do better though is to better integrate low level libraries like VideoJS and Shaka to web frameworks like React or Vue. Everything that is out there feels like hobby project someone just played with. Full respect and big thanks to the authors for putting it out though. You did way better than me in supporting open-source.

The html video tag is the smallest bit of the problem, adaptive streaming is much more complex and there isn’t just one file per resolution.