After an 6 or 7 years of being a specialised flash developer I came to the sudden, certain conclusion last night that flash is dead. It will never take over the world. It’s too hard to program really cool, useful applications in it. The recent chatter on my own personalblogosphere (mainly the boy dark0, pixelBox and andrewskinner[dot]name) has included chat about SilverLight, Microsoft’s new web-based rich media run-time environment. It’s a flash clone. Of course it’s not as good – it’s Microsoft & they’ve only just started. Flash has been around for years. But it does open up rich media application development to a more numpty level of programmer, which should be a good thing shouldn’t it?

In retaliation, Adobe have announced the launch of a new product – Flash Video Control;

Adobe has unveiled a version of its Flash media software to let copyright holders embed ads and control usage.

The new software should also allow video to be played offline, whether on computers or portable devices.

Flash is used on websites such as YouTube, the Google-owned video sharing site dogged by rows over the use of copyrighted material.

in a nutshell:

Content publishers are promised “better ways to deliver, monetize, brand, track and protect video content”.
The new software will be freely available in the same way as other products such as Acrobat Reader and Flash Player, for both Windows PCs and Apple’s Macintosh computers.

This is an interesting move. It shows Adobe respecting it’s pedigree as a video and creative production suite and moving away from Macromedia’s more techy/servery kind of approach. Will it work? Hell yeh. Video is amazing in flash. The success of youtube on a platform which doesn’t even stretch the player’s capabilities in the least is testament to that. Flash Video is good.

I’m currently working on a high profile Flash Video project for one of the largest UK media companies. The company name must remain under wraps until the the software is out there in the real world in a few months, but significantly they are currently running on a platform which is outdated and disliked by the public. They took that decision years ago because of Digital Rights Management concerns and they were right. Moving to a new platform would be like giving birth to a pineapple, but who knows. Perhaps this experiment in video content delivery by a major player will raise some eyebrows.

Perhaps this flash developer will become a Flash Video Control Developer. He’s certainly not going to touch SilverLight with a bargepole.

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