Twitch Starts Transition From Flash To A HTML5 Video Player
Today’s redesign moves half of the video player – specifically the controls – from Flash to HTML5 and Javascript. The video itself is still in Flash underneath the controls. However, this is an important step to releasing the much-anticipated full HTML5 player.
You’ll begin to see the new player on channel pages first. As previously mentioned, this is a gradual roll out. If you are not part of our initial pool of users, please be patient as we release the redesigned player at a steady pace.
This piecemeal milestone has no real world advantage but at least signifies a start of a transition. What’s weird, though, is that Twitch will serve users HTML5 video today. Just visit a streamer’s page in Safari on iOS or Mac (with no Flash installed) and it shows a working <video> tag. Some of the nice Twitch-branded UI is missing but the actual crucial activity, the playback of the stream, works flawlessly. It’s been like this for as long as I can remember.