Cable Forum - View Single Post - Virgin Media Player

peterjcat · 05-10-2010, 11:53

Without getting too much into the politics of it all: the installed base of mobile devices that can play Flash video is tiny compared to the number that can play other kinds of video but not Flash. This may well change in the future, but for now it would seem that to insist on Flash is to severely limit your potential audience.

Flash is (arguably) useful for its DRM capabilities, but the same thing can be achieved by using mobile apps instead of webpages -- Hulu Plus and Netflix seem happy enough to provide streaming to mobile devices through apps, and I haven't heard of their streams being compromised. And Flash can of course contain the same video and audio codecs that are common to all devices (notably H.264), so there's no need to encode separate streams for each platform -- it's just a question of packaging the streams in suitable containers, which is relatively straightforward.

Obviously a lot of content isn't licensed for mobile devices, but where it is, a relatively platform-neutral approach is surely the way to go -- rather than one that ignores what, for whatever reason, is right now by far the largest audience.

05-10-2010, 11:53	#17
peterjcat Inactive Join Date: Nov 2009 Posts: 36	Re: Virgin Media Player - why on earth Flash? Without getting too much into the politics of it all: the installed base of mobile devices that can play Flash video is tiny compared to the number that can play other kinds of video but not Flash. This may well change in the future, but for now it would seem that to insist on Flash is to severely limit your potential audience. Flash is (arguably) useful for its DRM capabilities, but the same thing can be achieved by using mobile apps instead of webpages -- Hulu Plus and Netflix seem happy enough to provide streaming to mobile devices through apps, and I haven't heard of their streams being compromised. And Flash can of course contain the same video and audio codecs that are common to all devices (notably H.264), so there's no need to encode separate streams for each platform -- it's just a question of packaging the streams in suitable containers, which is relatively straightforward. Obviously a lot of content isn't licensed for mobile devices, but where it is, a relatively platform-neutral approach is surely the way to go -- rather than one that ignores what, for whatever reason, is right now by far the largest audience.