Fans of college football and the Purdue University (News – Alert) Boilermakers will now be able to get their football fix on their mobile devices thanks to a new HTML5 backup video player.

PurdueSports.com and CBS Sports College Network have teamed up to create the player. Sports fans don’t have to install anything. The Purdue Sports website will automatically detect the device the user has and select the appropriate player for the user’s hardware. Users accessing the site using traditional desktop Web browsers will continue to be able watch video using Flash.

Adobe’s (News – Alert) Flash has become a de-facto standard for multimedia Web content on the desktop, including sites like YouTube, but many mobile devices, notably Apple’s iPhone and iPad, don’t offer it. Google’s (News – Alert) Android platform has followed suit in discontinuing support for new versions of Flash as well.

In addition to live coverage of football games, visitors can watch special content including short documentaries about the team and sports on the site.

HTML5 is a continuation of the Hyper Text Markup Language spearheaded by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a not-for-profit organization that maintains vendor-neutral standards for the Web.

The new version is necessary because the last version was defined in an era before modern social media services like Facebook and Twitter (News – Alert), when websites were mainly static text without interactive features.

HTML5 aims to add more features to allow Web pages to behave more like desktop applications, with the ability to save data to the user’s device. It also allows support for video. The advantage of HTML5 video over Flash is that it’s on open standard instead of Flash’s proprietary status.

Although the standard is slated to be officially released in 2014, many websites are taking advantage of HTML5’s features today, including video, due to the increasing use of smartphones and tablets, most of which don’t support Flash video. All of the major browsers, including Mozilla’s (News – Alert) Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer, support HTML5 features, with varying degrees of completeness.