The Internet Archive‘s entire collection of digital videos will now be available in HTML5 as well as Flash, the organization announced today.
The Internet Archive will be using Kaltura‘s open source video platform in order to deliver the 500,000 some odd digital video assets housed at the Internet Archive. Kaltura’s video player identifies whether a device and browser supports Flash or HTML5 and will deliver the content accordingly.
The Internet Archive’s deployment follows another recent project undertaken by the Wikimedia Foundation, which also uses Kaltura to power its video content.
The use of Kaltura’s video player matches both of these organization’s commitment to making sure content is easily accessible. Videos on Archive.org can now be viewed on the iPhone and iPad, as well as all standard browsers that support HTML5.
This also means that the videos will be more accessible to hearing impaired and multilingual users as the Kaltura video tools support the HTML5 standard for timed text – making it easier for video subtitles to be viewed across browser and device tytpes.
“It was clear to us that we must support both Flash and HTML5 in order to deliver content to all devices” says Tracey Jaquith, Digital Archivist and Video Lead at Internet Archive. Indeed, although more and more video content is now in HTML5 format, this large catalog of videos from the Internet Archive is a prime indication of the amount of material that is still available in Flash only.
