Okay I was starting this post because Joe Porter had made a tweet about people using flash for video and not using youTube of vimeo. He deleted the tweet almost instantly but being Hootsuite doesn’t remove deleted tweets I still saw it and it sits there. Here is the original tweet :)
jpapapnp - When will websites stop using flash for video? I can’t view it on my phone. Use YouTube or vimeo to embed it please!
We then had a few more tweets back and forth that I will also get into but will start there.
Okay the first thing to really think about is who controls your video. Now you can control some parts of it from youtube but in the end you are always giving up some of the control when you host it elsewhere. Most people don’t care about these things as just having a free place to put up videos is great. But for a company, you may not want your video showing up with ads on it for competing products or shady products. As well the related videos on the side could also be the same. Now you can pay to get a lot of that control back as well as try to brand the pages to fit your business better but that’s additional cost.
Here is an additional note that came up once the discussion went farther and Joe sent me a few screenshots from his iPhone to show me that there were a few wrong things with the original argument in that embeds don’t really work that well from those sites on your own either. Youtube works through an extra app and vimeo you have to go to their site for it to work.
As a whole video on mobile is just a big mess at the moment so to expect people to try to work around things just so your device works is asking a ton. Especially when most sites won’t see huge amounts of traffic from these devices (here at a Uni we see <1% on the site as a whole.) You are putting a ton of extra work so 1 or 2 peeps might view it.
As well, Flash is the defacto standard for video playing on desktop browsers. You know that when you put it out there as such that you are basically guaranteed that it will play (forget the high 90′s percent that they have off the top of my head.) Not all browsers support HTML5 or even the video codex that you might have choosen to put your file in (Ogg vs h264). While it’s nice to have the mobile be able to play it and it will be of value in the future, it’s best to just wait it out and let more things come together before making decisions on how you want to handle it.
Another point that came up was related to Flash in general and while I agree that Flash in general has taken some giant hits I also feel that it’s still a much needed tool and will always be needed. All the cool animations became better handled with JS and soon HTML5 will be the way to handle video online. But the thing is all these things were all catching up to what Flash could already do. The HTML5 spec is being designed for what would be best now, not the future. We don’t know what cool thing we will wish we had in the future and when we do figure that out it will takes years to get a spec and and all of the browsers to support it. With flash they can implement it as quickly as they want and roll it out to everyone for use. No waiting on standards or browsers.
I don’t see this being a huge need, as we can do a lot of really amazing things already and most people are still trying to come to grips with what we currently can do let alone think about what would be cool going forward but eventually that will come up and Flash is always in the best position to adjust for that. I also think it will still be around and have the huge install base because of legacy support for all those flash sites that will never go away. But only the future will really tell.
This type of discussion continues to undermine my belief that all this stuff is just magic and pixies in this electronic box. Yet I still fully believe in the gremlins in there.
dang hootsuite and saved tweets!! HA!
good stuff here… now if apple and adobe would stop fighting, we then might be able to come up with a plan that everyone could follow. I wouldnt be surprised if apple is making their own fix for it to take on flash.
Me personally, i view sites ALL the time on my phone. And having some standard of video for mobile users would be nice…but then again the world doesnt revolve around me :)
Hope something happens sooner rather than later