Online Video and Flash

Flash is winning the video wars on the net. You are probably asking yourself, Was there even one?

Well, let’s take a walk down memory lane to 2006. Joost had just announced itself to the world and beta users were posting favorable reviews. All seemed well, the buzz was immense and people were excited. Mostly.

The enthusiasm was short lived though. YouTube was delivering content with Flash and Hulu had started accepting beta invites. Not too mention all the hundreds of others who were being populated with content via their users.

People obviously did not understand why they had to download something to watch content when they could watch it on YouTube, and hundreds of other video sites, without restarting their computer {as Windows always make you do so when you install something}.

A lot of initial Joost users ditched the desktop P2P client and took to the videos being delivered via Flash on the web. Joost noticed this, probably too late, and started offering its content via Flash as well, that was somewhere around September – October of this year.

On the 19th of December, 2008 Joost will be discontinuing their desktop P2P client altogether and deliver all their content via Flash.

Image from Techcrunch.com

Obviously this is a win for Flash as a content delivery platform but an even bigger win for video on the web in general Hopefully we will see more such services crop up offering all sorts of content online without having users to download a client for each new one.

Can you imagine if you had to download a client from each and every single of the hundreds of video sites out there? Fuggedaboutit! I would never watch anything online if that was the case!

Thanks to Techcrunch for the story bite!


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Hyder

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