As Mark Twain put it, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest don't happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects." Normally the winners write history, but Apple's success and lofty stock price has given a number of media executives a bad case of P/E envy. They're distorting the past by accusing Apple of dictating terms of media consumption on the Internet.

The legacy of friction that existed during the first frontier of online video may have been put on notice last November, when the Interactive Advertising Bureau released VAST 2.0, an update to the Digital Video Ad Serving Template that it created in July 2008. The video industry had been in never-ending pursuit of standards for the five or so years prior to the VAST 2.0 update. Technical and operational procedure stalled behind the frenzy to innovate. It may have been assumed that the speed to create revolutionary delivery platforms and ad systems was necessary to accommodate the oncoming big brand …