Also, I believe the only way to deliver that content to a wide variety of browsers at the time was Flash. In fact Adobe/Macromedia may have only added the vide

Also, I believe the only way to deliver that content to a wide variety of browsers at the time was Flash. In fact Adobe/Macromedia may have only added the video functionality in the prior 5 years or so, so before that I think you couldn't even do it without making people install a plugin. Remember this was well before Chrome came out, and Firefox was still nascent. So a lot of people were using IE. I think Flash was already starting to fall out of fashion by then, but they realized there was a valuable technology deployed in it (video codecs).