At some point during the past few years, Adobe’s Flash technology became one of the most often used formats to encode streaming video on the Internet. From its start as a niche animation tool in the mid-1990s to one of the top streaming video formats today, Flash has followed a decidedly disruptive path, taking market share away from all traditional streaming video format heavyweights.
In the late 1990s, as Internet connections became capable of carrying streaming video content, a format battle arose. RealVideo, a purpose-built platform designed to handle the challenges of Internet streaming, quickly captured dominant share. Windows Media, despite the inclusion of its player within all Windows-based PCs, lagged far behind, slowed initially by poor video quality and streaming capabilities. Finally, despite offering the highest video quality, Apple’s Quicktime format lagged Windows Media’s share, suffering from a lack of promotion, the need to download and install a player application, and niche ownership of Macintosh computers.
A few years prior to the format wars of 2000, San Francisco’s Macromedia acquired a vector-based animation package, FutureSplash, and rebranded it as its Flash product. Flash was easy for novice and experienced developers alike to use, and its applications and animations could also be easily compressed to a small, Internet-friendly file size. As Flash applications and animations began to pop up throughout an increasingly interactive Web, Microsoft agreed to bundle the Flash plug-in within Internet Explorer 5. By 2000, it was being distributed within all AOL, Netscape, and Microsoft web browsers. In 2002, it shipped within all releases of Windows XP for an installed base within 92 percent of all Internet-connected PCs.
Initially, Flash was a format perfect for interactive applications and animations, but could not be used for the encoding of video. Over time, however, as the Flash platform evolved, it became capable of supporting increasing content frame rates. Soon, the line began to blur between animation and video. In 2002, after the release of new capabilities within Macromedia Flash MX and Flash Player 6, Flash’s broad installed base compelled developers to begin to use Flash as a format for encoding video. While its video quality lagged that of incumbent formats, Flash was “good enough” for some web video content, particularly in light of the fact that the majority of users could consume such video without needing to download and install a separate player application — a big plus.
Over the last six years, and more recently under Adobe’s ownership, Flash adoption has grown dramatically. Today, television channels including CBS, NBC, CNN, and ESPN, along with user-generated content sites such as YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, and Yahoo Video, all encode their videos using Flash. CBS.com, for example, is also just one example of many sites streaming Flash video 720p HD. According to a report published in April 2008, Flash-powered online video websites are now responsible for substantially more than 91 percent of online video traffic. While RealNetworks' RealVideo, Microsoft Windows Media, and Apple Quicktime remain players in the world of online video, Flash has clearly taken the lead.
Since its acquisition and re-launch by Macromedia in 1996, Flash has followed a classic disruptive trajectory through the world of streaming video. Its initial foothold, the world of web-based animation, provided a perfect niche for Flash to incubate. Bundled within all major web browsers, Flash then hitched a ride on a dynamite distribution mechanism, finding a home within 98.45 percent of all Internet-enabled PCs as of June 2008. Improvements to Flash technology, combined with its installed base, next enabled it to move up-market, tackling increasingly complex content until the line between animation and video was gone, along with the lead that had been enjoyed by the streaming video format incumbents.