It’s the brand of Adobe’s shame: “Flash Player Required.” Almost four years after the iOS platform took the world by storm, Adobe still hasn’t been able to get Flash Player on Apple’s platform, and while their arguments that Apple was just being unreasonable might have held some weight a couple of years ago, the failure of even modern Android systems to deliver decent Flash performance is very much a testament to the correctness of Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash.
It looks like Adobe’s finally ready to give up the fight, at least in part. Adobe has just announced a new method in which Flash video content can be streamed to iOS using HTML5.
Adobe is now supporting HHTP Live Streaming, or HLS, on the Adobe Flash Platform. This support will allow video streaming on any platform where Flash is not installed, provided that the browser is up to HTML5 spec. Best of all, it’s invisible to end users: an embedded Flash video viewed in Chrome on the desktop might serve up Flash Player, while that same page accessed with an iPad would stream the video using 4F4 over HTTP.
If Adobe can get Flash to automatically stream HTML5 video if Flash Player isn’t available, that will make 95% of the Flash content users actually want to watch on their iPads accessible under iOS. The other 5% — Flash webgames and advertisements — we can probably all live without.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
25 responses to “Coming Soon From Adobe: Flash Video To Your iPad”
I hope this happens very soon….not that I’m in a rush.
Given that it’s taken 4 years for them to come around, neither is Adobe!
This is pretty much a hack, isn’t it?
This is just spin by Adobe. By saying they are converting Flash video to work with iOS devices, they are:
1) careful not to mention they are using standard html5 video streaming formats and methods
2) careful not to mention this ‘conversion’ involves removing the Flash wrapper around the standard h.264 video data
This is similar to what they say about Flash support on mobile devices. They claim that all you need to access all Flash content on the internet is to have the Flash plugin on your mobile device.
What they don’t mention:
-ALL Flash content has to be rewritten to support touch and the small screen size of mobile devices vs desktop browsers. As reports for the Playbook confirm, when Flash on it wasn’t crashing, they couldn’t find much non-video content that worked properly on a small touch device
-ALL Flash video content has to be re-encoded to be able to be shown without breaking up or dropping frames on mobile devices [because they don’t have the CPU to decode it, and hardware video decodes only support very specific subsets of specific video formats]
I presume this technology will work very much like existing solutions do (this technology is not new, and notably, Wowza Media Server has had this capability for some time already). You still have your H.264 encoded content being streaming live or on demand–live will not be a requirement in this scenario, at least it isn’t with Wowza. The H.264 content is then automatically “chunked” and streamed over HTTP in the appropriate wrapper for the intended player. For iOS or Safari Mac, that will be Safari’s integrated version of QuickTime. For any other device or platform (desktop included), you’ll need Adobe Flash Player. If you want to see a demo of this type of switching, you can go to http://videorx.com/play/7G3UA. This technology also enabled _adaptive_ HTTP streaming, which is the best strategy for deployment of longer video over the Internet.
Awesome. Skyfire has been very helpful though. With this, it would be nice that we don’t have to get out of safari to view flash contents.
Yeah, I agree with Bitters, if Adobe had been smart they would now be sitting pretty good in the mobile industry. Now they look like a scowled dog with it’s tail between it’s legs. Come on people, in the end it’s all about getting money and if your pride or ego is too big to make a little money…well let me know how that works out for ya!
I hate flash :-(
I have seen Android play flash fine. Why all the lies to Apple lovers?
It is battery and bandwidth intensive, not to mention most Flash websites contain very little content and are just bloated SFX. Flash is outdated and I certainly don’t want to use it on my iPhone or iPad or any system for that matter. When I find myself on a Flash website on my MacBook I’ll actually click ‘back’ because I don’t want to deal with the tedium.
It is battery and bandwidth intensive, not to mention most Flash websites contain very little content and are just bloated SFX. Flash is outdated and I certainly don’t want to use it on my iPhone or iPad or any system for that matter. When I find myself on a Flash website on my MacBook I’ll actually click ‘back’ because I don’t want to deal with the tedium.
Got it in one.
No, this Adobe removing it’s proprietary wrapper.