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DID YOU KNOW?

Maybe Flash Video Ain’t What it Used to Be?

by Susana Polo | 11:32 am, May 2nd, 2010

A lot has been said, raged, and ranted about the iPhone and iPad‘s incompatibility with Flash.  On Friday, the movement away from Flash grew significantly larger when Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 9 will also leave Flash video by the wayside.  While Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch cited Flash’s problems with reliability, security, and performance, Steve Jobs took a more militant approach: statistics.

Of the 75% of internet video that is in Flash, he said “almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads.”

Well, you know what Mark Twain would say.  So how much truth is there to Jobs’ numbers?  Techcrunch has done some digging.

As it turns out, Flash isn’t doing so well.

In the past four quarters, the H.264 format went from 31 percent of all videos to 66 percent, and is now the largest format by far. Meanwhile, Flash is represented by Flash VP6 and FLV, which combined represent only 26 percent of all videos. That is down from a combined total of 69 percent four quarters ago. So the native Flash codecs and H.264 have completely flipped in terms of market share.

Techmeme also points out that all Youtube videos (40% of the video on the internet) are available in H.264.  See their article here for a handy chart, too.

(via Techmeme.)

  • hoggworks

    It seems like you’re misreading those stats. Microsoft isn’t saying that they won’t support Flash video, just that the only video codec they’ll support in HTML5 will be H.264. For Microsoft to can flash video, that would require them to somehow reach into every bit of video a user would load via the browser, and strip it out, optionally replacing it with H.264 video, if it indeed exists. That’s an unworkable option.

    As for the H.264 video, I think those stats are saying that H.264 is prevalent *within* Flash, so Jobs is technically correct that it’s not that big of a hit for video. This ability to be “open” and use H.264 is, ironically enough, a result of the way that the mean old “closed” Adobe implemented their video in Flash. Since you can watch H.264 in Flash, this doesn’t mean that Flash isn’t being used, just that the codec is already being used a lot.

  • Matthew Gudenius

    Umm, too bad Flash != video (for anybody who doesn’t know computers — like the author of this article — != is programming code for “does not equal”)

    FLV is called Flash VIDEO, and it is not the same as FLASH. FLASH is .swf format, and was designed for interactive vector graphics, animation, and multimedia. Video did not even become a part of it until Flash version 6

    I agree there is no need for Flash video… there never really was a need for it, actually.  But Flash itself is another story entirely… there are TONS of educational purposes, interactive games, and simulations that rely on Flash, and CAN’T be easily ported to another format such as HTML5


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