{"id":2184,"date":"2010-06-29T20:06:23","date_gmt":"2010-06-30T03:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnack\/?p=2184"},"modified":"2010-06-29T20:06:23","modified_gmt":"2010-06-30T03:06:23","slug":"youtube-talks-flash-and-html5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/29\/youtube-talks-flash-and-html5\/","title":{"rendered":"YouTube talks Flash and HTML5"},"content":{"rendered":"

The folks at YouTube have put up an informative post<\/a> about why, despite positive advances in what browsers support, “Adobe Flash provides the best platform for YouTube\u2019s video distribution requirements.”<\/p>\n

Of course, Flash is at death’s door, right? \u00a0I suppose you didn’t hear that ESPN just streamed the US-Algeria World Cup match via Flash to “the largest U.S. audience ever<\/a> for a sports event on the web,” with 1.1 million unique viewers. \u00a0Through 14 days of World Cup coverage, 5 million viewers have watched the World Cup on ESPN3.com and consumed more than 9.2 million total hours. \u00a0Somehow the Mac sites fail to notice these things. \u00a0(Actually, that few people notice is a good thing: billions of times a month, Flash just works<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

I’m sure someone will point out that Hulu will be streaming video to iPads<\/a> without using Flash as the presentation layer, so now<\/em> Flash is screwed, haw haw. \u00a0In that case, let me repeat what I said<\/a> a few months ago:<\/p>\n

\n

John Gruber wrote<\/a> the other day that \u201cHulu isn\u2019t a Flash site, it\u2019s a video site. Developers go where the users are.\u201d Well sure, of course<\/em> they do. Flash is a means to an end for Adobe, too, not the end unto itself.<\/em>\ufeff<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The folks at Hulu, like those at YouTube, are pragmatists. \u00a0They’ll use whatever delivery mechanisms, presentation layers, etc. they need to reach the most eyeballs. \u00a0On desktops Hulu prefers Flash<\/a>, for the same reasons YouTube cites. \u00a0(Even if more than\u00a013%<\/a> of the audience could play back H.264-format video on their desktops without using a plug-in, the browsers are lacking in content protection & other vital areas.) \u00a0On mobile devices, Flash Player’s support for H.264<\/a> (and later VP8) makes it easy to use an alternate player to display the same video files.<\/p>\n

I’m not saying all this to rile people up. \u00a0I just get tired of all the uninformed rah-rah triumphalism out there, so I thought I’d help share some real-world perspectives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The folks at YouTube have put up an informative post about why, despite positive advances in what browsers support, “Adobe Flash provides the best platform for YouTube\u2019s video distribution requirements.” Of course, Flash is at death’s door, right? \u00a0I suppose you didn’t hear that ESPN just streamed the US-Algeria World Cup match via Flash to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[32,34],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2184"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}