Sunday, April 4, 2010

The iPad & Flash


It has already been covered a number of times on TechCrunch that the iPad, like the iPhone and iPod Touch, will not feature flash. A rather contentious point with many people when you consider the amount of content on the web that is Flash based. In fact, many critics have gone as far as to say this could be the downfall of the latest weapon in Apple's arsenal of world domination. All this may be mute, however, if you look towards HTML5 and the possibilities that it promises. The brilliant folk at Brightcove, for instance, have already set out a roadmap (see below) outlining how they will use HTML5 for streaming video when the viewing device is detected as an iPad. Furthermore, even on an iPhone browser video thumbnails will launch a Quicktime player.

Brightcove CEO, Jeremy Allaire, says, "HTML5 is great, it is an open standard, and firmly entrenched in the Apple device platform. Flash can’t reach those platforms for political and business reasons.”

While it's true that HTML5 can't do everything that Flash can (specifically in relation to supporting advertising, audience measurement and social sharing), Brightcove have promised that they will bring HTML5 video up to par with Flash for Brightcove users. Allaire says that this will take until the end of the year, going through a number of iterative stages to get there. First Brightcove videos will play back in a very basic HTML5 player when they detect an iPad. The next step will be to add audience measurement and advertising features. Then finally Brightcove will work on upgrading the actual interface so that iPad and iPhone users don’t notice the difference between it and the Flash version of their player.

The actual raodmap will go as follows...

1 comment:

Sarah said...

Even without HTML5, no doubt Apple are already plotting a 2g and 3g device, which will inevitably (eventually) recognise Flash. As like the rumoured 4th gen iPhone. Ahead of the game or lagging behind!?