A VC - Latest Comments in Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

mbrosen — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:23:52 -0000

Link: 10 Creative & Rich UI's and How to Create Them

All javascript, Ajax and CSS. No Flash required.

http://www.noupe.com/design...

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

mbrosen — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:54:04 -0000

"Fred, as for audio, a lot of the "embedded" Flash audio you speak of often isn't Flash at all, but just a script wrapped around an mp3 file for usability/interface. Nothing that couldn't be usurped by HTML5/JavaScript and MP3/AAC --- even more standard and "universal" than Flash."

From daringfireball.net yesterday:

http://daringfireball.net/l...

"Did you notice the little inline audio players on Apple’s iPod Shuffle web pages?

http://www.apple.com/ipodsh...

When playing, it animates with a circular progress meter.

Very cool — and very much like the iTunes song preview controller on the iPhone. Even cooler: no Flash involved. It’s QuickTime with this JavaScript to draw the animation using the HTML 5 <canvas> element. Doesn’t work in MobileSafari (yet?), but at least MobileSafari can play the audio in its usual (full-screen) way."

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

Clark Hamon — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:27:29 -0000

If a publisher manages their content through a comprehensive vieo platform and CMS like Castfire (www.castfire.com), the content will immediately be available in multiple different formats so that users can watch it on a desktop, on an iPhone, on a Zune, on Tivo etc. Though Flash is coming out the odds on favorite to rule the web - it is not the be all end all. And particularly when you talk about delivering content to the Living Room via broadband - which is going to be the norm before long - Flash will not be that mechanism. There will continue to be different standards for all these different devices - the trick - at least in the next few years - is making sure that your content can be viewed no matter what that device and standard is.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

JoobsAreDelicious — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:17:23 -0000

Some thoughts:

1) Tailored apps are usually the best user experience. They also cost a lot more to develop. Using a single platform like flash makes you more capital efficient.

2) The 'seamless' experience. As a user, Fred doesn't care whether the music he's listening to from the artist he just clicked on is being processed by Flash, HTML5 or tiny German conductors. He, like me, just wants there to be a one-click distance between interest and tunes. This is an issue of how we browse content - as long as the WEB BROWSER is our primary interface, then a seamless experience necessitates a browser based solution. HTML 5 would do the job, but so would Flash. And the latter with better capital efficiency for companies with *existing* IP investment in Flash. And any startup deciding to focus on JUST the standards deals with this:

3) Flash vs. Open standards - even if it is destined to die a horrible death (with spitting and jeering from the standards zealots), and HTML5 was 100% battle-tested and ready to go, does anyone have any good projections for how long it's going take for the open standards support to get to 85%+ of desktop users?

I'm in like with open standards, but Flash will continue to reach a lot more people for a lot longer, so unless your target market is tech dorks (love the dorks), Flash is going to be your happy space. You'll know the time has come when YouTube ditches its flash player. 2011? 2012?

Mmmm... joobs.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

Luis Antezana (luckylou) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 14:35:19 -0000

Great point about the authoring software. What's funny is that Adobe could have just built into that authoring software easy ways to post native or optimized audio/video content (which is what the original poster ultimately wants to view in iPhone) that played fine through QuickTime and thus on iPhone, but they choose to wrap that A/V material so that the Flash plugin is required to experience it. It's Adobe that is making the user go through extra steps to hear A/V sources.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

gfurry — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 09:46:23 -0000

I would love flash on the iphone. What I don't love when I click on a flash video and it brings my 8 processor mac pro with 6GB of ram to its knees. Adobe needs to get flash working perfectly on the desktop on all platforms and consolidate it. What is included in flash? shockwave, flex, air, etc...

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

fredwilson — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 05:58:07 -0000

Think of it this way. I hear about a new musician. I google them. I find a
video of them playing a song. On the web I hit play and I can listen. On the
iphone, I have to download an app to listen? That's not seamless

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

fredwilson — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 05:47:06 -0000

"a hack on crack"

I like that one

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

alvin — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:27:46 -0000

There are lots of short animated films created using Flash and exported as SWF online. Without Flash, this content is locked out on the iPhone.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

David Burrows — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:09:58 -0000

Ahh, loving this thread, all the old flash vs. standard arguments which I've seen a million times.

It's true that Ajax, DHTML and Javascript have most of the web app market sown up, but what everyone misses is that it's not the plugin that makes the experience, it's the content, and for the talented people that make the videos, games, dynamic sites and interactive experiences that make the web interesting Adobe are their main tool vendor. Flash & Photoshop are the key tools that are used to develop 99.9% of the visually interesting sites on the web and Adobe have a workflow that lets ideas flow from brain to browser. While Adobe own the workflow, Flash will be dominant.

Open Source has made little to no impact in professional design shops (Processing is the honourable exception) If you want to see a previous debacle that went nowhere research the continued failure of SVG to get any market share. Until someone stands up and give interactive designers Adobe level tools to produce content for open formats the above argument is just noise, Flash will remain dominant.

Why are Apple blanking Adobe? Remember, Apple are probably the creative industries number 2 tool vendor at this point. With their acquisition of Final Cut & Logic they directly challenge Adobe in the video & audio areas and are encroaching on other areas with their Pro apps (Motion v After Effects, Aperture v Lightroom etc.) I doubt there's any love lost between these guys. Apple will make Flash work on the iPhone when the market tells them and not before, Adobe aren't going to make them do anything they don't want to.

p.s. I'm no Adobe apologist, some of their software both sucks and blows so I'd love someone to come up with an workable alternative - unfortunately i doubt they'd last long before Adobe made them the proverbial 'offer they can't refuse,' even Macromedia succumbed eventually.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

Claudio Luis Vera — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:02:41 -0000

There are two very good business reasons for Apple to snub Flash:

1) it's easier to write apps for Flash and AIR than the AppStore. If you open this up, there's not much of a need to go through Apple to publish your app.

2) Flash video competes directly with QuickTime. As of December 2008, both platforms handle the H.264 codec natively.

"Next year" will go on to "year after next" until Apple finds a way to keep Flash from cannibalizing its offerings.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

Ade — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:00:44 -0000

I've been developing Flash for years and heard all these "Flash is over" arguments a 1000 times but somehow i'm better paid than ever in the middle of a recession. You can't run your iphone app anywhere else so Apple is doubling the development costs of a cross platform widget. Flash/AIR should be the best solution and you can develop an AIR app without paying Adobe for any software. Techy geeks might not like flash but the kids do and once the competition catch up with Apple's interface then they won't be so popular

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

Sheila — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:44:23 -0000

It is so trivial to download an app to the iphone. It is not at all like downloading and installing an app on a computer. It is also trivial to get rid off. I don't buy the seamless argument at all.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

Dabbler — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:29:39 -0000

if the iPhone Safari browser is any indication it's going to be a loooong time before working Flash emerges on iPhone.. I've had several updates and Safari still crashes way too often

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

Matthew Wensing — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 10:21:34 -0000

The problem with this meme is it mixes two audiences--standards zealots (I don't mean that pejoratively) and entrepreneurs. As a startup founder with a site (Stormpulse.com) whose main engine is Flash, I applaud your pragmatism, Fred. While Ajax + CSS may suffice for many, there's one thing that Last.fm, YouTube, Pandora, twhirl et al. have in common--they are successful, and they leveraged the Flash runtime's advantages over DHTML: namely, speed and compatibility. I am happy to do the same and leave the 'true opening of the web' to those without browser-related end-user concerns (i.e. when 50% of all of your users still use IE 6 ...). When their work is complete, I'll jump ship. For now I fly the Flash flag and lament having to write an Objective-C app to bring our site's experience to the iPhone.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

Doug Kersten — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:13:48 -0000

I am testing the Skyfire browser on my HTC TouchPro Windows Mobile phone and it has Flash built in. It was amazing when the first site I went to with Flash loaded up and I was immediately able to play media files!

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

Doug Kersten — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:11:27 -0000

Apple is being an idiot about Flash but it fits with their culture of control of your hardware and software. It will be their ultimate downfall. I just can't buy a product where the vendor feels it is their right to remove software, especially if I purchased the software. This is Apple's legacy.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

Bob the eClown — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:50:45 -0000

You are a hack on crack; everyone I know is removing Flash because of it's very real disruption (i.e. crashing) of a functional webbrowser.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

Luis Antezana (luckylou) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:45:55 -0000

Thanks to all the intelligent commenters who refuted the original blog post here more eloquently and with more specific detail than I could.

One thing I wanted to add is that iPhone can already play many QuickTime-supported media formats in the browser. No special upgrade or third-party player need be downloaded to achieve this. If the content providers would make the files available in an iPhone-optimized form we could play them directly. I've tried linking directly to .mov and .mp3 files and they play right in the browser.

And of course slightly undermining my statement, a .m4a and a .3g2 file I tried did not play at all. I might expect that with a video file taken from a Treo, but the audio file, which was encoded from iTunes, albeit a long time ago, was a surprise. Still, I am not an expert in digital media content formatting, and any provider trying to make theirs available for mass consumption would encode in an efficient and compatible format.

My point is just to say that there are already very easy ways to play audio video files on an iPhone in the browser without a third-party app, since that was part of the original post's argument.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

Theo — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 11:25:52 -0000

Wow - amazing discussion.

Fred - I wholeheartedly agree with your overarching thesis - I spent 3 years selling mobile content in Asia, based in Tokyo and the only companies/developers who force you to download are the hard core game (eg Final Fantasy). EVERYTHING else is done in the browser. I'm amazed when I see an iPhone with 50-60 apps and wonder how long the user will flick through his home screen to access these little silos.

Phone usage should be pretty damn close to PC usage at the end of the day -- dedicated client for email, IM and gaming (however there are a ton of very popular flash gaming sites in Japan) with everything else done in the browser. Does anyone use Pointcast anymore? Then why should I be forced to download a Weather Channel iPhone app? It's ridiculous.

With respect to the whole open/closed debate -- I agree the closed nature of Flash is an issue, but in my (non technical) opinion, it is the price you have to pay for stability. Users have a much lower tolerance for a mobile browser crashing or "hanging".

One more point -- the 30% rev share to Apple also really disappoints me. Docomo takes 9%, and the paid mobile content market in Japan has thrived from the beginning. Move the revshare to 10% and let 1000 flowers bloom!

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

George Nimeh — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 10:30:41 -0000

You're both right: Apple has a blind spot, but it doesn't matter.

Fred makes a good point about Apple's closed-minded architecture and business model. I think it will hurt them over time.

Eytan's point about the user experience is spot-on. At least for now, tailored apps are much better than one-size-fits-all.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

George Nimeh — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 10:19:18 -0000

Spot-on.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

alindh — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:57:41 -0000

http://www.adobe.com/produc...

Adobe indeed charges a per-unit royalty for each shipped Flash Lite runtime. Wonder if the full version of Flash for mobiles (as announced during MWC) will be free of charge (like the desktop version)...

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

alindh — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:46:36 -0000

All technical issues aside, could this be a cost/greed issue? Flash on other mobile devices has so far been a selling point for device vendors, and if I remember correctly, Adobe has been licensing the runtime to device manufacturers (i.e. device manufacturers pay actual money to Adobe for each shipped device with the flash (lite) runtime installed). Could the culprit actually be Adobe, and we're not seeing Flash on the IPhone because they are demanding a licensing fee from Apple? (I'd guess the existing licensees wouldn't be to happy if they'd let Apple ship the runtime for free?...)

Here are a couple press releases to announcements of Flash Lite licensing:

http://www.adobe.com/macrom...
http://blogs.zdnet.com/micr...

Does anybody know how much a dev. manufacturer might need to pay for licensing Flash? A one-time fee, a per-installation fee, or...?

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

fredwilson — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:00:11 -0000

Nope. We don't download an app to use google or youtube or read techmeme or
buy something from amazon. More and more games we play on the web don't
require a download. I think the app ecosystem is a bridge to a mobile web
that works just like the web.