December 2nd, 2008 by Hall
Well, Peter over at Quirk has definitely drunk the Flash koolaid, with a pretty evangelistic article this morning detailing the virtues of Flash over QuickTime.
Of course, we’re right with him.
Up until somewhere in the middle of 2005, we were stuck releasing videos in both Quicktime and Windows Media player to accommodate different operating systems. Not only was this more of a hassle in the encoding/production end, but it was up to the user to figure out which of the platforms worked best for them (and often neither was natively installed on their computer).
Quicktime and Windows Media also have the problem of loading in their own player, which disrupts the browsing experience. In contrast, Flash can be embedded seamlessly with a web page, themed to match a site’s look and feel, pull from a remote site, as well as accommodate a variety of tracking methodologies (such as all the ability to comment in the middle of a clip in Viddler or the emerging field of real-time video behavior/viewing analytics).
And of course, it’s the technology we use to encode our archived webinars and what you see on YouTube.
In most cases, it’s great to have diversity. But the world of DVD technology and online video, it’s important to have a king.
December 4th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Thank you for this interesting post Fred.
Now that Flash is used more and more as a platform than just a way to distribute media it indeed has many added advantages over QuickTime.
What a great step for Adobe’s newest Flash Media Server to let us finally be able to just drop in a native H.264 MOV and have it play straight to FLV without any manual conversion. That process and intelligent media scalability alone cuts down on so much tedious production time and distribution costs.
It will be fantastic when Flash fully finds its way onto the iPhone. That change will open up so much more for the mobile media and advertising realms to help their customers and really enable companies like Hall Web Services to evolve into entire new markets. We are slowly getting there… http://tinyurl.com/5l7b38.
Best regards and looking forward to your next post.
Eric
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Eric Rowe
http://www.erowe.com
December 5th, 2008 at 9:57 am
Eric,
Thanks for the insightful comment — yeah, we’re just touching the iceberg of possibilities opened up with the emergence of iPhones. We’ve been experimenting with the wireless market for some years now, but now wireless browsing is really moving from the realm of early adopters to the mainstream.
(Though I admit, I still like a phone that functions as a phone!)
Another nice thing about Flash, which I think you’re touching on, is how you can embed analytics tools into user behaviors and use that to really figure out how well received A/V pieces are, though I still think online multimedia advertising is in the “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” era.
Best,
Fred