I like Apple’s h.264 encoding, but I depend on Flash…
Apple has already announced that a YouTube application will be available on the iPhone when it launches, and that it will use Apple’s h.264 codec for displaying videos. And while I do feel that h.264 is technically better that Flash (IMHO), I still can’t see Apple releasing the iPhone without having a plan in place for handling Flash based content.
From a purely selfish perspective, all of the video I produce for this blog requires Flash, as does most of the video I embed.
And I am not alone in this…
Most video publication services on the web use Flash as their primary distribution format: YouTube, Google Video, Brightcove, JumpCut, Vimeo, Videoegg, VideoJug, and Revver to name some of the key ones. And most dynamic banner-style advertisements use flash as well. There are even some web sites built in whole or part using flash, and some sites that use it to support specific applications they deliver.
It’s a ubiquitous plug-in web developers have learned to count on…
At this point, we have no official word from Apple on the availability of Flash. All we have is a great deal of speculation that it isn’t going to be there in the iPhone and that Apple is somehow ‘clueless’ about how important Flash is.
Apple may be a lot of things, but ‘clueless’ isn’t one of them…
My guess is that we will hear something definitive on the iPhone and Flash this week. Something directly from Apple. It will either be an announcement or even a new video outlining unambigious support for Flash. Apple likes to leak information out – it’s part of their campaign building up to the actual launch event. This approach would certainly be in keeping with how they’ve released infomation to date.
Like their recent Tour Video showing support for Word, Excel, and Pdf files…
Those were big negatives people were hammering on for the last few months. Apple let the negative expectation build, then brushed it aside with a few brief comments in 20 seconds of video.
And in the process, turned it from negative buzz into positive momentum…
If Flash support will not be there for launch, but coming ‘real soon now’, my guess is we’ll hear something OFFICIAL this Wednesday or Thursday. If it’s already there, we’ll probably hear about it as a ‘just one more thing’ right at the launch. Whatever the case, the time has passed for Apple to be breaking bad news. If they had no intention of supporting Flash at all, I believe they would have gotten that message out already. They wouldn’t want to take a chance on having a negative surprise cloud such a meticiously planned rollout.
Apple is most certainly aware of what people are saying about this theoritical ‘lack’ of Flash, and would never want to leave the messaging around that to chance if the news wasn’t good. Not managing that type of news would simply be a rookie mistake.
And that’s not likely.
After all, Apple invented the playbook for doing product launches right…
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