Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash? | Hacker News Reader

Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

avc.com

>> "But the mobile web will eventually just be the web. And a big part of getting it there is to get the tools that allow us to seamlessly consume rich media on the web onto mobile devices. To me that means Flash."

To me, and hopefully Apple, that means <video> <audio> etc - standards based media. Using Flash to do video and audio is a horrible hack. If browsers had <video> and <audio> 10 years ago, I think flash would have died off in usage just as Java applets have.

long term i am sure you are right. but right now if you want to watch a youtube video or listen to streaming audio in a flash player on your iphone browswer you can't. sure you can download an app, but that seems like a backwards approach. should every experience on the iphone require an app?

Flash versus Open

Perhaps one thing we can all agree on is that the future of the web, mobile or otherwise, will be more or less open. That would be HTML, MP3, H.264, HE-AAC, and so on. These are not proprietary Adobe products, they are open standards…unlike Flash.

In confusing codecs with UI, Wilson keeps asking, “why is it tha[t] most streaming audio and video on the web comes through flash players and not html5 based players?” The answer is rather pedestrian: HTML5 is just ramping up, but Flash IDE has been around for many years. Selling Flash IDE and back-end server tools has been a commercial focus for Adobe, while Apple, for example, hasn’t paid much attention to QuickTime technologies and promotion in ages. It’s thus reflected in adoption patterns.

Hopefully, this summary will clear Wilson’s blind spot:

Apple is betting on open technologies (as it makes money on hardware) while Adobe (which only sells software) is betting on wrapping up content in a proprietary shackle called Flash.

From:

Does "A VC" have a blind spot for Apple? http://counternotions.com/2009/02/16/open/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com