So Flash and Flash Video look to be open now, at least from a marketing perspective. Not cynical or anything, truly hoping that this does work out. I’m excited. This is a big announcement. Many interesting things will happen because of this… some of thing things on my mind I am hoping will happen:

1. The last reservations of the neckbeard/”Flash is a binary blob” will melt away. This may take a while, but we can certainly hope so. Open source zealots will have little to complain about with Flash player 10.
2. The open format of the SWF/FLV will really push Adobe to continue to improve it, pushing it light years ahead of other web and desktop runtimes out there.
3. The Nintendo Wii will get Flash player 9.
4. The iPhone will get Flash.
5. 64 bit linux plug-ins will finally happen
6. A multitude of easy to use or low cost Flash streaming solutions will materialize.
7. Commodity hosts will begin to offer FLV streaming
8. FLV playback could get bundled into DVD players, set top boxes, etc.
9. Virtually every mobile phone in the world will have Flash
10. Appliances and other consumer electronics will begin to adopt Flash as the preferred UI development platform, thus increasing the market for Flash content exponentially making your skills as a Flash platform developer even more valuable.
11. Open GL Support? Maybe, please?

Some things I am am concerned about:

1. Flash players will become fragmented and certain variants will lack features.
2. FLV players will popup on machines that can only act as dumb video players but lack interactivity capabilities making them second class citizens in the landscape.
3. Refrigerators will now have ad banners running on them.
4. Poor implementations of the Flash player will skimp on security, tarnishing SWF’s name

After reading the FAQs and watching Kevin Lynch’s video, I am hopeful that the good things I mentioned will happen, and pretty sure that the bad things can be avoided. Check out the video here. How about you? What are you excited about? What are your concerns?

There is undoubtedly going to be a lot of info coming out in the near future on this, even though the true effects of the announcement might not truly be felt for months. Peter Elst has some comments really worth reading on this announcement, too. Ryan Stewart has some info, too.

Posted on May 1, 2008

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