Question: Is Google-fu powerful enough to make a success story out of WebM, a new, open-source video format for rich-media web delivery? Answer: It’s complicated.

The popular video-sharing site Vimeo announced this week that it was revamping its playback for better compatibility with mobile devices that don’t support Flash video. Basically, that means the iPhone and the iPad. Vimeo will automatically serve a different version of the video player — Flash or HTML5 — depending on the environment it’s being viewed in. (There’s a clear explanation of how this works at the Vimeo Staff Blog.)

That’s great news for content creators who use Vimeo to distribute their video online. But publishers and web developers are finding the environment for online video delivery is far from settled. Apple claims to have plenty of good reasons not to support Flash in its iOS operating system, ranging from battery consumption on mobile devices to a reluctance to let Adobe become a middleman between Apple and its application developers.

Read more at the StudioDaily blog.

Movie Trailer: The Social Network

Whoever is ultimately responsible for this new trailer promoting David Fincher project The Social Network is almost certainly not getting paid enough — unless, perhaps, it’s Fincher himself. Generating a sudden wave of positive Internet buzz for a movie that had previously been considered something of a question mark, this piece works on its own not just as an advertisement for Fincher's movie but as a standalone short, scored to a choral version of Radiohead's first single, that considers the nature of identity, online and off.