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Page 1 of 2 Flash Video has taken over the web video industry. There should be little doubt by now that Flash Video is a major player—in any sense of the word—with online distribution of video. I've personally worked on several high-profile Flash Video deployments, and you can see the evidence of Flash Video on just about every major video-enhanced web site. Here's just a few that have made the headlines:
The other video players on the market, such as Microsoft Windows Media, Apple QuickTime, and RealNetworks Real Player, used to be the mainstay on nearly every video-enabled web site. Now, they're left scratching their heads as to why Flash Video has taken over major segments of the industry in so little time—it's nearly an "about face" from many video distributors in this year alone.
Flash Video content can be viewed on any Flash Player distributed in the last four years. Starting with Flash Player 6, Adobe (then Macromedia) added the Sorenson Spark codec to the player plug-in. Flash Player 6 is installed on over 96% of Internet-connected computers in mature markets, such as the US, Canada, Japan, and Europe. Flash Player 7 and 8 have adoption rates higher than 90%. The Flash Player is also widely distributed across multiple computer systems, including Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS 9 and X, and Linux. No other video player can boast that fact—more on the "numbers" later in this article.
Flash Player 8's addition of the On2 VP6 codec has been a major driving force in the quick update of Flash Video on the web. Many online distributors felt that the quality of the Sorenson Spark codec simply was not good enough to carry their brand image on the web—Sorenson Spark, while processor- and RAM-friendly on a wide range of computers, just didn't have great quality over low bitrates compared to those offered by Windows Media, QuickTime, and Real Player. With the new VP6 codec, however, image quality and definition improved greatly, especially at lower bitrates.
The Flash Player is one of the simplest and fastest comprehensive multimedia plug-ins to install on a web browser. And if you're like most people, you have Flash Player 6 or higher installed, which means you qualify for the Express Install experience. Express Install enables the Flash Player to auto-update itself to the latest version without requiring the visitor to head over to Adobe's site and download an installer file. Express Install—at its most inconvenient—makes you restart the browser after the installation process has completed. If that does happen, your browser automatically reopens to the web page that initiated the Express Install.
Perhaps one of the best reasons that Flash Video has quickly become the darling of web video providers is the simple fact that you can build comprehensive experiences with the Flash Player. You don't have to mix-and-match one video plug-in with another multimedia plug-in to build an experience. Before Flash Video, sites that want the great quality of Flash graphics for buttons, text, and user interactions had to hack through a mess of web browser inconsistencies to integrate other video plug-ins on top of Flash user interfaces. Now, everything can be built with the Flash platform. And perhaps more importantly, since the advent of Flash Player 8's ExternalInterface API, the Flash Player's extensibility in JavaScript is consistent across all the major browsers.
It's crazy for me to think there are still business clients out there that want to maintain two or more flavors of a web experience: one for folks on Internet Explorer Windows with Windows Media, and perhaps another one for folks visiting from some other platform. I guess if they have the budget to maintain two separate parallel sites, then more power to them. But it just makes more business sense to have a consistent experience for everyone coming to the site. With Flash Video, you can truly build one and deploy everywhere. No fuss no muss.
Keywords
Flash Video
