Is Flash dead?

There has been a lot of commotion on the Internet since the announcement of the iPhone/iPad not supporting Flash. This has created a veritable panic on the Internet as most people see this as a sign that the popular multimedia format is on the decline.

But, with all things Apple, there is always an ulterior motive. Fancy animation effects aside, Flash is the dominant video delivery format on the Internet. Without the ubiquity and ease of installation of the plug-in to enable easy video playback in a brower, it is unlikely that Internet video stars like YouTube would have reached critical mass.

As an alternative, Apple has suggested HTML5, which is an open standard that includes a number of new APIs that allow you to interact with the browser in a more application-like way. One of these new APIs is a video element tag that can play a video in the browser with a single line of HTML code:

<video src="videoURL" />

Seems simple enough, and in the last few months many of our customers have approached us about creating a replacement Flash player for them using HTML5. However, with HTML5 you are plunged back into the browser wars of the 1990’s, where web developers had to test their websites in multiple browsers and versions (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Safari) in an effort to minimize the different behaviors for standard tags. This image sums it up really well, showing the fractured support for HTML5 features across all popular browsers, with the worst culprit being, as usual, Microsoft Internet Explorer. Even within the simple ‘video’ tag, there are differences. All will support the MPEG4 format, some will support the OGG video format, and probably only Chrome will support the recently donated VP8 codec.

One fact that is little discussed on the topic is that only Apple Safari will support live streaming using their open HLS standard which also works on iPhone/iPad. This is a major show stopper for any customer that provides a mixture of live and on demand content, and will require you to have a Flash or Silverlight player around for live event delivery. Adaptive bit rates? … only supported by Safari. The other major disadvantage is that players now days don’t just play video. They are full-fledged applications that authenticate users, secure content, navigate playlists, search and recommended content, display advertisements, and submit analytics data. To fully move to HTML5, each one of these major functions will need to be developed in AJAX/JavaScript. The downside with JavaScript is that the code is visible, meaning that calls to backend systems will be exposed, and implementing security, including DRM, will be harder.

In summary, Apple’s ban and HTML5 is not the silver bullet that will kill Flash. For the moment, it is actually making things harder for content owners to get their content out to all platforms using a single format, and if you want to stream live video to more than just Apple products, you will need to use Flash or Silverlight.



Author, Forest Johns, VP of Solution Engineering