Ask HN: Were playing web videos without Adobe Flash possible before HTML5?

I was quite surprised to find out that the `<video>` element wasn't supported until HTML5, which didn't reach W3C recommended status until 10/2014. I did a bunch of searches for this, including before 2013, 2011 and 2008. The later showed no results. I found the `<object>` element which can play videos, but that seems to depend on browser support for the video formats (containers + codecs), did browsers have native video playback before HTML5?