Uncertain future for Flash
Apple has been fairly vocal over the past month in its opposition to Adobe’s Flash player. The company, or at least Steve Jobs, has unequivocally said that it will not be supporting Flash on its iPhone and iPad devices. Not now and not ever.
In its place Apple is pushing the H.264 format, a standard which is owned by the MPEG LA consortium. That consortium says that although the format is proprietary and is wrapped up in patents, it won’t actually charge licence fees for its use until 2016.
Exactly what it will do after that is unclear but it, and the consortium members, could be looking at a healthy income stream from licensing fees. Unsurprisingly, Apple is one of those. As is Microsoft.
The big question is, however, is Apple influential enough to kill off Flash?
The answer is probably no.
No doubt Apple, the biggest IT company by market capitalisation, wields a fair amount of influence. And with more than 3 million iPads sold in the past 80 days that influence is not inconsequential.
Nevertheless, Flash will endure, for at least a while yet.
If you consider that YouTube, which serves up as many as 2 billion videos a day, almost exclusively uses the Flash format. YouTube is currently piloting an HTML5-based video service (using H.264 or VP8) but almost all of the videos currently on the site are almost exclusively in Flash formats.
And it’s not just YouTube that uses Flash, almost all video sites do, as well as online games sites and entertainment sites. An older survey of websites by browser maker Opera found that in most countries around 30% of websites were built in or contained Flash elements. And in some countries that was as high as 40% or 50%. So it’s safe to say that as much as 30% of the web relies in some or other way on Flash.
Influencing a change in that is going to be hard work for Apple and will keep Adobe in business for some time to come.
Ultimately, however, Flash’s future is looking less rosy than it ever has.
Flash is not going to die overnight but HTML5, in particular, is going to start eating into its share of the market. HTML5 introduces elements such as scalable vector graphics (SVG) for drawing images on screen, a built-in video tag which can be hooked to the H.264 or VP8 video format, and a range of on-screen editing and manipulation features that bring interactivity to the web (see some of the demonstrations).
The decline for Flash will be slow, however. There is a huge industry in Flash with trainers, developers and graphic artists who have relied on Flash for so long to provide web interactivity that they are heavily invested in it. Re-skilling takes time, money and many will be reluctant to do it.
Flash may well disappear in the long run, but it won’t be killed off by Apple alone.
Flash’s future << give your views
Loading ...