Jilion, the makers of the cloud-based HTML5 video player SublimeVideo, are today making the product more accessible through the introduction of a freemium offering. When the service launched earlier this spring, commercial plans were available, starting at the relatively affordable rate of under $10 per month. But when it comes to user adoption, nothing beats “free.”
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It seemed, for a time, that the book on mobile Flash as we knew it was closed. Adobe announced just a few weeks ago that development for mobile Flash would cease, and their efforts and resources would soon be focused elsewhere. As it turns out, Adobe has one last project up their sleeves before they bid mobile Flash adieu: an update that includes support for Ice Cream Sandwich. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — took advantage of the early rays of the new rising sun to record. It must have been fun to watch the caffeine kick in, but the show was half over before I arrived. I’d been up late mourning the death of Flash, which finally received an auto-update from reality it couldn’t refuse.
Next for a wake-up call is Google+, which @scobleizer ripped a new one while continuing to insist it was just a matter of some filtering and expanded fan pages. Meanwhile it’s time to play with Amazon Fire, which the rest of the Gang has on order, and salesforce.com’s new Do.com service, for which I’ve obtained an invite code good for 500 uses. This show is rated G+. → Read More
Adobe’s mobile Flash efforts have recently gone the way of the western black rhino, and Principal Product Manager Mike Chambers isn’t too pleased with how the Adobe chose to broke the news. In fact, he feels so strongly about it that he’s offered up his own clarifications on the matter.
“Our goal was to be very clear about WHAT we were doing, but in doing so, we didn’t pay enough attention to explaining WHY we were doing it,” he said on his blog today. Fair enough — the official Adobe announcement was pretty abrupt. So, now that everyone’s settled down a bit, why did Adobe really pull the plug?
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Adobe has discontinued development of Flash-Player plugin for mobile browsers.
This is a very important moment in the history of the mobile internet. Since 1997, Flash Player has been an important part of the web. From flash games, to streaming video, to sound, and sockets, many of the most important and central components of the online web experience have leveraged Flash-Player technology.
However, Flash-Player has failed to make the transition to the mobile web.
How could this have happened? How is it that a company with the resources of Adobe could possibly fail to overcome this hurdle? → Read More
I can’t help chortling a little in Schadenfreude at Adobe’s expected announcement that it is abandoning Flash for mobile devices. For most of the past two years, the anti-iPad contingent has cited flash incompatibility as the primary reason they weren’t going to give Apple their money yet the devices they did back – the Xoom, the Notion Ink Adam, the Playbook, and the like – all shipped with buggy or non-existent flash implementations. But I will not chortle, friends, because this is some serious stuff.
First, I want to say Flash wasn’t a bad idea for mobile. It would have been amazing in the early years of the smartphone revolution. It was comfortable, familiar, and a great way to get app-like functionality onto phones that might not have been powerful or popular enough for a real development platform. However, it was never implemented in a way that added value and what value it had value really peaked a few years ago and has progressively dropped over the past few months. If I’m to pick nits, I’d like to show this video from Lee Owen. → Read More
The year was 2008. I was at an event focused on mobile, sitting in on a roundtable discussion with several folks from key companies in the industry. One gentleman was from Adobe. The iPhone had launched the previous year, famously without any support for Flash. A lot of folks were up in arms about this — including several at this table. The guy from Adobe assured everyone: mobile Flash would be coming soon. And it was going to be wonderful. The notion that Apple wouldn’t include it on the iPhone because of performance issues was pure hogwash.
The same thing was said in 2009.
The same thing was said in 2010.
The same thing was still being said in 2011. → Read More
Ardent iOS supporters have been clamoring for true Flash support for years, and with the announcement of their new version of Flash Media Server, Adobe completely fails to deliver. Instead, they’ve managed to update their media server with a way to get streaming Flash video running on Apple’s myriad iOS devices. → Read More
In more news of Flash’s impending decline, Google is announcing that it’s “deprecating” the Google Maps API (application programming interface) for Flash. This API previously allowed developers to add Google Maps functionality within their Flash-based applications.
However, as of today, use of the API is limited, says Google, with only a small number of applications taking advantage of features unique to the Maps API for Flash alone. → Read More
Yokto is a newly launched video platform which offers an embeddable player that intelligently switches between a Flash-based interface or HTML5, depending on the device being used to view the content. This idea on its own is not original, of course. Similar solutions from companies like Brightcove, Ooyala, Kaltura and SublimeVideo, for example, offer much of the same thing.
But where Yokto stands out is in its “playlists” feature. Instead of simply embedding a single video on your website or blog, you can collect a series of videos from multiple sources and embed them on your website within a single player interface.
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Adobe Flash is to the smartphone as an unwanted cousin is to your wedding: necessary, yet painstaking. Apple CEO Steve Jobs seems to hate the software, neglecting to support it on all four models of the iPhone. Google’s done a better job of incorporating Flash support into the Android operating system, but still, most of the time Flash ends up being a battery killer, a security risk, not to mention a total bandwidth hog. That could change very soon though, as Qualcomm and Adobe have announced the development of optimizations for better Flash Player support in mid-level to high-end Android smartphones powered by the Snapdragon family of processors. → Read More
The news from NBC/Universal/Comcast is that the cable giant has finally made deals with both ABC and Fox to carry selected shows on their on-demand service. This is big news for the iPad set, because all four major broadcast networks are now available in a single service, on the iPad, without Flash.
Across town we hear talk of hardware acceleration linking up with Android to make Flash finally usable on every other device. This would be a good thing for Flash fans, who can make the argument that more devices will work with Flash than won’t. But in the new world of network broadcasting, the show’s over for Flash. Nobody cares what makes the picture dance on the screen, just that it does. → Read More
I still don’t particularly like the fact that Google decided to bundle Adobe Flash with their Chrome web browser about a year ago. Apple preference aside, the last thing I want is the buggy, often insecure, and performance killing plug-in shoved in my face. More importantly, I think it’s a maneuver that will only serve to slow the transition to HTML5. But Google has their reasons. And today, we see one of the good ones.
Google has maintained since they started bundling Flash that it was mainly to ensure they could make it more secure for their Chrome users. They do this by both sandboxing it and auto-updating it when the security patches regularly appear. But a new feature has just hit the Chrome dev builds which also now allows users to easily clear Flash cookies from within the browser. → Read More
Earlier today, Adobe Labs released Wallaby, a way to convert simple Flash games and animations into HTML so that it is readable on “devices that do not support the Flash runtimes.” Those would be iPhones and iPads. In other words, Wallaby is Adobe’s way of bowing down to HTML5 and, by extension, to Steve Jobs who has always insisted that there is no need for Flash because HTML5 will take over.
Adobe’s capitulation to Apple has been going on for a long time—first with Flash converters for iPhone and iPad apps, and now with Flash in the browser. Remember that Apple at first tried to block Adobe’s moves, but eventually relented.
So Wallaby is a converter for Flash content on the Web that makes it Apple-friendly (it really works with any Webkit browser). That’s all well and good, and the way it should be, except this Wallaby cannot jump very high. → Read More
I read an interesting article this morning that suggested Apple would change its mind and put Adobe’s Flash technology on its iOS devices within a year. I don’t think that’s going to happen.
In an open letter to users, Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave several reasons why he didn’t want Flash on the iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. They are: Flash isn’t open; the full web; reliability, security and performance; battery life; and touch.
Adobe began shipping Flash Player 10.1 for Mobile last June, but even Laptop magazine admitted that “Steve Jobs was right,” and that “Adobe’s offering seems like it’s too little, too late.” Granted, that report was from six months ago, but it still doesn’t bode well for the technology. There is no doubt that Adobe is making advances with Flash on mobile devices, but I don’t believe future changes will be enough to get Apple to adopt the technology. → Read More
Bad news for those of you who were looking forward to the release of the Motorola Xoom, the world’s first Honeycomb-based tablet. It seems that the tablet will not ship with Adobe Flash at launch, and that you’ll have to wait to sometime this spring to see proper Flash support. That’s a shame. → Read More
Adobe released version 10.2 of its Flash Player yesterday, but this bit of news may have flown under the radar. It seems that Adobe worked with AMD in order to bring hardware acceleration to Flash video—provided you’re using recent AMD hardware, of course. What could be better than hardware accelerated YouTube videos? → Read More
Earlier this week, Google wrote a very short post on their relatively small Chromium blog to announce a big change: they were dropping support for the H.264 codec in Chrome. While they may have tried to whisper it, the post resulted in a shitstorm that reached high into the heavens. It seems as if just about everyone weighed in on the decision (including us, twice).
As a result of the fallout, Google decided to follow-up on their three-paragraph post with a ten-paragraph one today more clearly outlining why they’re making the move. It certainly is more clear, and that’s perhaps what makes it even more frustrating.
As Google notes, this is all about the HTML <video> tag. The search giant cites an impasse in figuring out one codec to use for the future of HTML5-based web video. Safari and IE are backing H.264, but Mozilla and Opera refuse to, and had been backing Ogg Theora. So Google dreamed up WebM and got Mozilla and Opera to sign on board. Unfortunately, we’re still at an impasse, because it does not appear that Safari and IE will be doing the same any time soon. → Read More
Do you smell that? Just wait a second. You will.
Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.
The bolding is mine, but that’s Google’s actual statement as to why they’re dropping support for the H.264 video codec from the Chromium open source browser (from which Chrome is built).
Erick wrote up the main story earlier today, but in my opinion, he didn’t go far enough in calling bullshit on this maneuver. Namely, how on Earth can Google get away with dropping support for one popular codec under the guise of “open” when baked into their browser is Flash, the decidedly un-open plug-in? → Read More
In the world of online video, there is a battle brewing over the next dominant standard for online video, especially on HTML5 Web pages. Today, Google took the gloves off and declared that it will soon stop supporting the H.264 video codec in its Chrome browser. Instead, it will only support open-source technologies such as its own WebM initiative (with its VP8 codec) and the open-source Theora video codec, which is used by Firefox.
You could see this a mile away. Google announced the WebM project last May, along with other partners Mozilla and Opera (Apple, which relies on H.264 in its mission to squash Flash, was conspicuously absent). The H.264 codec is owned by the MPEG-LA consortium, and may in the future require a license. Although the consortium was pressured into promising that H.264 streaming would be free forever that is only for non-commercial Internet video. → Read More
