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Comment by samsonradu | Hacker News Reader

+1 for this. Another example would be live streaming. yy.com comes to my mind right now, it's fully flash and used by millions of users. gaming.youtube.com does Flash too on Firefox, not to mention all of the adult streaming sites. Funny how everyone is asking for Flash to just disapear, if it had never been around we'd all be screaming for a plugin that makes all the above possible.

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No, we wouldn’t scream for a plugin making that possible, but we’d scream for a web standard.

We already have a way to transmit two-way video live in browsers (WebRTC).

It should be not to hard to use the codecs existing for that to make a one-way live streaming in browsers.

Well, WebRTC is indeed a way, but it's very far from a standard - Chrome and FF supporting it only - and has some issues. It's difficult to do multi-casting with it and eats up a ton of CPU resources. If it were scaleable and usable one of these multi-million dollar businesses would adopt it by now don't you think? I haven't seen anyone pick it up.

Yes, we need some additional standards to build upon it, but at least the decoders exist in Chrome, Firefox and Safari on all modern platforms.

If someone would add a small standard extension (like Microsoft originally suggested) to allow for one-way streams, we could do livestreaming over it, too.

Preferably even make it seamless – allow pointing a video element to a livestream source.

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