With the rise of YouTube came the implicit conclusion that the online video format wars were over and that Flash Video (.FLV) had rendered both Apple’s QuickTime (.MOV) and Microsoft’s Windows Media (.WMV) formats to the trash heap of history. But Steve Jobs may have found a way to secretly move YouTube away from the low-resolution and low-quality Flash Video format and strike a decisive blow against Adobe:

...Youtube will be encoding all of their videos into a “H.264 streaming-efficient compression format” specifically for the Apple TV. All of Youtube’s videos are currently encoded in Flash Video (FLV) format.

While no official reason is given for the mass transcoding of Youtube’s entire catalog, Macformat.co.uk believes it has to do with the iPhone.

“As far as I know even now, Flash content per se might not play on the iPhone from day one. But Apple clearly doesn’t – indeed, shouldn’t – care, as YouTube is for many people the most critical site that uses Flash.”

Indeed, both the iPod and iPhone can play H.264 encoded video, and so it seems the entire Youtube catalog may also become available to those devices later this year.

It’s almost as if Steve Jobs took a move from Bill Gates’ Microsoft monopoly playbook, by tying the video format to the hardware devices, content providers have no choice but to adopt Apple’s video software. Although it seems interesting that the Apple “tail” managed to wag the YouTube “dog.” Who needs whom more?