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One important use of flash video is in ads. Many users feel these ads are too intrusive, but the industry demands them and they have near universal adoption.

by brg 17y ago

One important use of flash video is in ads. Many users feel these ads are too intrusive, but the industry demands them and they have near universal adoption. Penny-arcade had a strict policy against such ads, but when 99% of ads requests became flash based even they changed their tune. That short-content, user generated video hosting sites have experiments with the video tag does not signal imminent shift in the platform.

Lazlo_Nibble 17y ago
One important use of flash video is in ads. Many users feel these ads are too intrusive, but the industry demands them and they have near universal adoption. Near-universal adoption on the supply side is irrelevant if there's no demand on the consumption side.
- abstractbill 17y ago
  Users don't "demand" ads of any sort, let alone Flash ones. Advertisers demand Flash-based ads, because they can do stuff like animation and sound, but more importantly because they can use Flash's full tcp/ip sockets to send arbitrary tracking information home (e.g. how long was the ad displayed for, any mouse-over events, browser and os information, etc).
  - blasdel 17y ago
    You can do the same with an embedded <iframe> sourced from your own adserver
ericd 17y ago
That's fine, the short-content, user generated video hosting sites were the only legitimate non-annoying use of Flash that most people deal with (except browser games). Now we can just leave all flash blocked.
- brg 17y ago
  Hulu's streaming video is provided by flash. Web based applications which need video interaction, such as Rosetta Stone online, are flashed based. And flash based games, as you mentioned, are a significant use of flash outside of ads. For the latter, note that creating a flash based games and apps is going to be significantly easier than doing any approximiation in javascript with canvas/o3d/video for quite a while.
gnosis 17y ago
"One important use of flash video is in ads. Many users feel these ads are too intrusive, but the industry demands them and they have near universal adoption. Penny-arcade had a strict policy against such ads, but when 99% of ads requests became flash based even they changed their tune." This is one of the major reasons I don't have flash installed in my browser. As a consequence of this and using privoxy to block regular html ads, my web browsing is virtually ad-free.

by brg 17y ago

Lazlo_Nibble 17y ago

One important use of flash video is in ads. Many users feel these ads are too intrusive, but the industry demands them and they have near universal adoption. Near-universal adoption on the supply side is irrelevant if there's no demand on the consumption side.

abstractbill 17y ago
Users don't "demand" ads of any sort, let alone Flash ones. Advertisers demand Flash-based ads, because they can do stuff like animation and sound, but more importantly because they can use Flash's full tcp/ip sockets to send arbitrary tracking information home (e.g. how long was the ad displayed for, any mouse-over events, browser and os information, etc).
- blasdel 17y ago
  You can do the same with an embedded <iframe> sourced from your own adserver

ericd 17y ago

That's fine, the short-content, user generated video hosting sites were the only legitimate non-annoying use of Flash that most people deal with (except browser games). Now we can just leave all flash blocked.

brg 17y ago
Hulu's streaming video is provided by flash. Web based applications which need video interaction, such as Rosetta Stone online, are flashed based. And flash based games, as you mentioned, are a significant use of flash outside of ads. For the latter, note that creating a flash based games and apps is going to be significantly easier than doing any approximiation in javascript with canvas/o3d/video for quite a while.

gnosis 17y ago

"One important use of flash video is in ads. Many users feel these ads are too intrusive, but the industry demands them and they have near universal adoption. Penny-arcade had a strict policy against such ads, but when 99% of ads requests became flash based even they changed their tune." This is one of the major reasons I don't have flash installed in my browser. As a consequence of this and using privoxy to block regular html ads, my web browsing is virtually ad-free.