Looks Like Flash Will Win the Web Video War
So Adobe bought Macromedia to compete with Microsoft. ANd what does Microsoft do? They immediately concede the Web video war by discontinuing the WMV player for Mac.
Now Flash is the only cross-platform video player with any sort of install base. Though I wonder how big QuickTime’s install base is now that every Windows machine with iTunes installed has QuickTime. Perhaps QuickTime is poised to overcome WMV as well?
The mistake here is thinking that 95% of the market, all the Windows machines, is enough and they don’t need the 5% of the market that are Macs. But a lot of video is produced by people on Macs, and they aren’t going to use a format that they can’t even see.
Oh, I know there is the Flip4Mac QuickTime extension. I tried it. So far, I can’t get it to work for anything. Some WMV doesn’t show up at all, and others player incorrectly. For instance, when a video has an ad first, followed by the content, I get only the ad and then nothing. I wasn’t going to use WMV for a future video project anyway, but now I’m not even going to worry about it.
3 Responses to “Looks Like Flash Will Win the Web Video War”
Well said. Some coworkers and I were talking about Flash Video last night, and you’re right on. Flash is set up to really do well in the video space.
I heard the latest version of OS X (10.4.4) includes a Quicktime codec for WMV.
I think Flash and Quicktime can co-exist.
PS. When do we hear about Adobe’s commitment to Director? Support for Intel Macs??
I saw a blurb on Yahoo that shows iTunes having a 14% worldwide penetration now. I’m not sure what QuickTime numbers alone look like, but I still see Flash as the dominant crossplatform format moving forward.
Adobe built in the export out to FLV, etc with the just released AE7 which makes it easier to just use that format right from the project. All signs lead to a continuation of the current trend towards flash video. From my perspective at least.
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