Video has been a relatively recent use for Flash, where it pushed out QuickTime (which Steve stills stews over), MediaPlayer, Real Media Player, and others. It'

Video has been a relatively recent use for Flash, where it pushed out QuickTime (which Steve stills stews over), MediaPlayer, Real Media Player, and others. It's always been an odd purpose for it, given that it's an ultra thin wrapper around a standard stream, so extracting that stream seems to be an obvious choice. Many "flash videos" are simply a h264 video consumed by an SWF, so decoupling that seems like a big advantage.