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Comment by kylec | Hacker News Reader

Porn companies are surprisingly innovative and technologically savvy - they will figure out a way to deliver their experience on the iPad without Flash.

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As long as there is a media player which works on the ipad, porn will too.

On a side note. I find the example very very funny. If Apple did indeed hurt Adobe's feelings, then I think the best way to say "You need me" is to show why. Gosh. Am I the only one who finds this example amazing on so many different levels?

1) Movies wont work 2) Flash sites wont work 3) Tv sites like Hulu wont work (based off of the example?) 4) Porn, what the internet is really really great for, wont work

I usually browse with Flash disabled, and I have never needed to enable it to find porn. This is the first I'm hearing of a porn site that requires Flash, in fact...

Porn comes in all shapes, sizes, colors and formats, just as about everything else on the internet. You're bound to be able to find most things on the internet not requiring flash, but many other sites do too. Flash enabled rich internet applications first, and was there to enable such functionality before our browsers could natively handle such things. Flash is an extension of the browser, an extension featuring functionality heralded now by HTML 5.

I don't get why people hate Flash. Sure it's proprietary, but it was there first, doing something we all wanted before anyone else came around. And frankly it's still serving that purpose because HTML 5 still isn't ubiquitous enough.

It probably contributed to YouTube's success, and the general flourishing of online video. It's enabled rich browser based games. I think it contributes greatly to the advancement of the internet, if not by any other means than by encouraging the proliferation of rich applications.

If flash was more performant and stable, I think people would be less opposed to its continued dominance.

FOSS advocates should thank some deity that Adobe is as marketdroid infested and incompetent as it is. There's nothing so good to shore up your case as your enemy making a hash of his.

Yea, thank Flash for rushing HTML 5 into our browsers, don't blame them. Not like there was a viable alternative before.

Doesn't excuse them for making Acrobat installs that are clearly marketdroid-devised bloatware. For heaven's sake, they once installed stuff with Acrobat that wasn't VBScript malware but might as well have been! (Yes, they had VBscript background processes bogging down Windows.)

Thanks in part to them HTML5 is seen as a blessing by many, even as late as it is.

Truth be told I'm not a porn surfer. I'm not a member of any porn site or anything, so I have no idea whether porn sites actually use flash. The thing which really gets me, is that adobe is clearly attempting to get a message across.

I like sticking it to the man. I'm not one of those people who spend their life sticking it to the man, but I always find it humorous when other people do it. Especially one big company to the other. One big company to a country. Makes me happy to see people challenging and keeping others in check- so to speak.

One doesn't have to be a member of a porn site to look at porn on the internet. Most of it is completely free. Check out redtube.com, youporn.com, wide6.com, etc.

If they support html5 video, why wouldn't video work? You can still encode the video to add advertisements like traditional media.

Hulu and similar sites use advertisements that can't be skipped. Can't do that with HTML5.

Why not? You could encode the original video as multiple segments, in order to watch the next segment, you have to watch an ad. Maybe use some kind of long polling to ensure that the advertisement was watched in its entirety -- supply a unique key at the end of the 30 seconds that the client has to rehash. It's a relatively minor engineering challenge, but I'm sure it can be solved.

It's really quite easy to do with a bit of javascript magic and some backend work. Not sure why you'd think it's impossible.

I was attempting to be general and be the background voice which says "Well, if it can be done, it will be done"

I believe Adobe should show that flash works on both the Iphone and the Ipad. I heard some people saying that apple reject their implementation because was draining all the battery in 30 minutes and suggested that they should "rewrite" it using gpu to make it faster.

Adobe show the flash player working!!!!!

3) Tv sites like Hulu wont work (based off of the example?)

I don't suppose Silverlight is going to get on the iPad either. It's how I started to watch Netflix streaming on OS X. I see now that it's used on the PC side too.

HTML5 already works on mobile Safari, Apple use it, Youtube use it, Vimeo use it.

Porn will start to use it too.

Adobe can call shit on Apple for games and applications (bleh! Flash apps) but not so much for video. HTML5 video is obviously way more open than Flash.

How long until the default way of putting video online is using the <video> tag and a snippet of JS to fall it back to a flash-player for non-HTML5 browsers?

I'd guess that the iPad moved that date up quite a bit. And suddenly Flash-plug-in risks going the way of the Shockwave-plug-in: nice to have, but not really missed. And sites that depends on Flash for stupid eye-candy will see the drop in compatibility, and switch to stupid jQuery eye-candy.

Web games?

JS+Canvas is nice, but it's not nearly performant enough yet, even given how unperformant Flash is.

My point is that web games is all that Shockwave did when it died/was retired by flash. Flash got its initial traction by spicing up the pretty static web (that role is largely replaced by jQuery (and similar)) but it's complete indispensability came with video.

Actually that's a good point. JS+Canvas will get there at some point soon. Especially with HMTL5 web workers. Check out an example of a WebGL Game (not HMTL5).

http://nitobi.com/yohei/cube_defense_alpha/

This only works in the latest WebKit/Firefox developer builds but it's pretty awesome stuff. This would really eat into the reasons for Flash.

This statement has become a cliche of sorts. Does it really hold truth? I hear it so often that I just accept it, but what are they actually doing to make so many people say this?

I've always thought it was because they provide content that is fungible. One porn video or picture is pretty much replaceable with any other, perhaps within a certain genre.

Compare that with Hollywood video, TV or the music industry. Is one movie or show really replaceable with any other or do you want a specific film, show or album.

So, by comparison they are a more competitive, freer market hence greater innovation.

The other fast mover is scripture, which is public domain and so finds its way onto each new medium very early on for similar reasons.

I think the innovation is in quick adoption as it is usually said that the porn market is always one of the first to adopt a new media, be it mobile devices or blue rays or a new touch screen computer.

what are they actually doing to make so many people say this?

A lot of it is left over from the days of Beta/VHS. They really made those formats work.

They're already doing this with streaming video for the iPhone, so, yes.

(Google the obvious keywords if you need a link.)

Why is it surprising? It's a multi-billion dollar industry that depends on technology (physical and digital) for distribution.

There are already some porn apps(mostly censored tho) in the app store. About 3-4 in the top 25 paid apps and top 25 free apps.

BOObies(No. 13 paid app)

Boob Party(No. 24 free app)

Tasty Pasties 18..(No. 45 free app)

Right on, they are usually ahead of other companies about 2-3 years.

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