Don’t look for Greg Pulier to be caught flat-footed in the looming battle over online video formats.

Pulier, the president of video technology developer MediaPlatform (known as Interactive Video Technologies until last year), was among the first to embrace the use of Adobe’s Flash platform for business communications several years back at a time when many industry participants dismissed Adobe’s potential for addressing the business video market.

Pulier has looked increasingly prescient in the past year as MediaPlatform has leveraged its head-start in supporting the Adobe platform to capitalize on Adobe’s growing commitment to the enterprise sector. Adobe in the past year has rolled out a major initiative for addressing key issues in business video deployment, including features designed to help in caching and distributing video content on a more network-friendly basis.

The trends seemingly put Pulier and MediaPlatform in the cat bird’s seat, with a solid head start in developing a full-fledged rich-media communications platform tuned specifically to capitalize on the Adobe video eco-system.

While one might be tempted to lean back and rest on the laurels of its successful early call to support Adobe in the business sector, Pulier and MediaPlatform are not inclined to stand still. Rather, the company is in the process of expanding its horizons – video format wise – with plans to launch versions of its solution that work in the emerging HTML5 framework – the video infrastructure commonly associated with distributing video content to the universe of Apple (News - Alert) iPhones and iPads.

MediaPlatform’s support of HTML5 will definitely start by the end of the year but could kick off as soon as two months from now, Pulier said. The exact timing of the HTML5 offering will hinge on technology development issues outside of MediaPlatform, Pulier said – declining to elaborate.

The way Pulier sees it, the future of video formats for the business sector rests with Adobe Flash and HTML5. Conspicuous by its absence in Pulier’s worldview are the flavors of video from Microsoft (News - Alert) – whether it be Silverlight or classic Windows Media. “I don’t think they’re in the game anymore,” Pulier says.

That’ll be taken as an interesting – and perhaps controversial – viewpoint by many MediaPlatform competitors. Just last month, video conferencing vendor Polycom (News - Alert) agreed to plunk down $50 million to acquire business video software developer Accordent, combining two firms that revolve in tight orbit around technologies and video solutions developed by Microsoft.

In Pulier’s calculation, Windows Media is a part of a world focusing on pure video streaming not well suited to play in the emerging business world where the idea of bringing multiple communications technologies together under a single “unified communications” umbrella is becoming increasingly in vogue.

“Windows Media is still a good format if you want to do something for free,” Pulier says. “But if you want a true communications platform, you need to go with something designed to do that.”

One subject area where Pulier does find common ground with rival industry executives is in the growing belief in mobile platforms as a key driver of future business video activity. Tablet computers, such as Apple’s iPad, are specifically well-suited for video consumption – a fact that will drive greater usage and acceptance of business video content overall, Pulier said.

“The tablets will shape the future in how people consume video at work,” Pulier said. “People don’t want to sit at their computers for a mostly passive (video viewing) experience. That works much better on the iPad.”

And that helps to explain MediaPlatform’s pending embrace of HTML5. “We steering our product development to make sure we’re supporting that,” Pulier said.

To learn more about MediaPlatform check out this video interview from ITEXPO East 2011.

Steve Vonder Haar is Research Director and Founder of Interactive Media Strategies (News - Alert) and is responsible for the firm's coverage of the enterprise Web Communications sector. To read more of his articles, please visit please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Patrick Barnard