The thing is, Flash isn't just for making sites. It isn't just for playing videos. Is a multimedia platform which can be used, among others, to make sites (alth

The thing is, Flash isn't just for making sites. It isn't just for playing videos. Is a multimedia platform which can be used, among others, to make sites (although its not a good idea imho but some people like it), media players, front ends, games (a very big market), web applications (like those image painters or sound editors), widgets (for stuff like graphs), chat rooms and others. The implementation is compact (just 4MB) and the files it uses (SWF) are also very small and network friendly (support streaming to almost all levels). The player might not be the best piece of engineering, but it works and as i said there isn't any alternative that enables people do all that Flash can do.