It was not so long ago that Shockwave Flash technology by Adobe was not supported on the iPhone. This had directly impacted the users—with the inability to surf those websites, which depended on it, to stream content. This, among many other reasons, gave merit to open standards, and the need to have compatibility across the various end user devices such as tablets, smartphones, and desktops, without vendor lock-in.
To understand this better, one needs to realize that music and movies were not as popular as an on-demand service, a few years back. YouTube, which contributed to the rise of video sharing, was founded only at 2005, and showed great potential growth by late 2006.
Browsers were not equipped with the ability to play and manage the streaming of video or audio media. Adding to that, the plethora of file containers and codecs (you know these as divx, xvid, mpeg2, mpeg4, and so on), it's understandable why this was a task that browsers did not take upon themselves. Adobe's...