it could be trouble for flash apps, but probably not for a little while. In reality flash is a mature product and it will take some time for HTML5 to catch up / filter down. However, I think that it is a move in the right direction - flash is a proprietary technology, and so opening it up the doors to something new like this is a positive thing.

There are already releases taking advantage of HTML5, longtails JW player has already been released as a HTML5 compatible version, and there are a host see more of excellent feature demos out in the wild. It's not surprising that longtail should jump onto this as the video tag will likely make players such as the JW player obsolete in the coming year - the only place you will still see apps like this will be in explorer - for legacy support - lol.

Magnussoft - the canvas tag is already a pretty powerful thing - couple this with javascript and you are most of the way there - add in the SVG integration and I think you can do most of the same - and natively too.

Unfortunately this is all academic if you use IE8 as it does not support any of it.

/DM