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.
on 1/13/2006 at 10:30 am