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The man in charge of BBC online activities has responded to accusations that the use of Flash is a form of proprietary favouritism.
Writing in a blog post, BBC director of future media & technology, Erik Huggers, denied that the adoption of Flash across BBC services amounted to a betrayal of the corporation’s commitment to open standards.
"Our use of Flash is not a case of BBC favouritism, rather it currently happens to be the most efficient way to deliver a high quality experience to the broadest possible audience," said Huggers.
"Let’s also not forget that we already support a very wide range of other formats and codecs to deliver BBC iPlayer and other services to variety of devices," he said.
Huggers went on to sell up the potential of HTML5 for delivering "much more than a new way of delivering video playback in a browser," but also said that HTML5 was beginning to "sail off-course", citing proprietary HTML5 implementations from web browser vendors.
Microsoft’s commitment to HTML5 was also called into question before delivering an impassioned plea to the HTML5 working group to maintain the momentum behind the development of the new web standard.
"HTML5 is more important than any one motivation. Speed is of the essence. Professional integrity is of the essence. We are counting on you to bring one HTML5 to the web and the W3C to help make this happen."
Image credit: BBC
