Though HLS only plays natively in the Safari browser on the Mac, most off-the-shelf players, such as JW Player, enable playback either via Flash or JavaScript, so achieving pervasive playback on Windows and Mac browsers is not an issue ... Interestingly, just before this column became due, JW Player’s John Luther, who spoke at Streaming Media West, shared some statistics about Flash, HLS, and DASH usage among the more than 2 million websites and 17 billion videos played per month using the player. Specifically, he reported that of the streams that JW Player delivered, 58 percent were delivered via HTML5, compared to 42 percent for Flash. However, of the HTML5 streams, 65 percent were MP4 files delivered via progressive download, which means they used the video tag rather than the Media Source Extensions. HLS garnered a 15 percent share of files delivered via HTML5, compared to about 1 percent for DASH.
