I was talking tech at Andrew Baron's UWS apt the other night. Andrew is the founder of Rocketboom, and a pioneer of the art of short web news videos, going back to 2004 when that art was booting up.  

Andrew told me that when he started Rocketboom, video content was distributed in QuickTime, Apple's video format. I remembered that well. Every weekday Rocketboom embedded a new QuickTime movie in their home page. Click play and the video would play. It was the same everywhere. QuickTime was the standard way to view video on the web.  

Then something came along that took QuickTime out of its dominant role: YouTube. Instead of using QuickTime to display videos YouTube ran Flash. Almost overnight leadership changed from Apple to Adobe.  

Somehow in the discussions about Apple banning Flash from iPads and iPhones and removing it from shipping Macs, this seems to have been overlooked. Apple's motivations might not be performance, the purity of the platform, or even battery life. It might simply be an effort to wipe out QuickTime's major competitor.