Googe v Adobe, new game?
cringely.com
cringely.com
My guess, knowing nothing at all, is that it's probably 100M for some patents, either to push into the <video> standard, or to fend of something they think is coming.
Also, how do Adobe & Docs compete?
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-311956.html - "Adobe launches competitor to Google Docs"
Flash has one significant advantage over plain <video> in a browser: it's got a guaranteed compositing model. This is important for YouTube because they display advertisements as alpha-blended overlays on top of the video.
If they switched to <video>, there would be no guarantees whether a browser supports compositing of <div>s over a video layer. On some platforms video hardware acceleration is implemented in such a way that it's not possible to render any other content over the accelerated video window, so just checking by user agent wouldn't be sufficient to ensure that compositing is available.
It's a can of worms that YouTube might not want to open, considering the increasing importance of on-video ads to their revenues.
In WebKit, you can composite on top no problem. I would be surprised if it doesn't turn out that way in Firefox.
I don't have any numbers to support this assertion, but I'm convinced that the on-video ads are enormously more effective than any alternative that would place the ads outside the video frame. (For one, the on-video ads are in a location where viewers are conditioned to watch for subtitles, which makes them that much more difficult to avoid.)
In WebKit, you can composite on top no problem.
Not everywhere. I'd bet it doesn't work in Nokia's WebKit browser on Symbian because the platform doesn't support compositing on accelerated video. The same problem may exist on Windows (depending on graphics drivers and DWM), if <video> rendering is implemented using DirectShow.