[citation][nom]longerlife[/nom]Actually it is nothing like the analogue to digital transition. There are no plans to transition the services you mention to HTML5 yet. The html5 videos are part of a beta experiment (for UTube at least) and is being used to assess the viability of using it. At present html5 is not widely supported enough to even consider replacing Flash, and with announcements like this they may never have to.[/citation]
AIR is a platform, not a media player. It allows a flash based program (usually Adobe Flex) to run on the desktop and act like a Java program.
It will be a long time before HTML5 becomes a W3C recommendation, and years before it can compete with Flash. All HTML5 has now is built in support for video and the canvas tag (very crude 2d animation, not even timeline based). And even when HTML5 becomes a standard in 2016, Internet Explorer wont have it implemented until 2020 with the way that team works... LOL