Flash Wars: Adobe Fights for AIR with the Open Screen Project [Part 3 of 3]

Published: 08:00 AM EST

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Flash has plenty of enemies and obstacles, but it also enjoys wide deployment and familiarity. Two areas where Flash can offer real value is in displaying and packaging video on the web, and in serving as a Java replacement for developing applets. Here's a look at how Adobe is working to defend its strengths in the face of competition, and how its efforts to open the Flash specification in the Open Screen Project play into these efforts.

Challenges to Flash Video

Flash rapidly took over the market for embedding videos into web pages and popularized the proprietary FLA video container format. However, as the industry has moved to support the more advanced and open H.264 video codec, Adobe has been forced to drop its obsolete old FLA container and migrate toward H.264 itself, both as a codec and as a container file.

Since nearly all modern mobile devices now play back H.264 content in hardware, any advantage to using the Flash software player is now waning outside of the feeble web environment on PC desktops. Even there, Adobe only owns the playback of largely non-commercial content. Nearly all purchased video content is being distributed by Apple through iTunes, and most streaming content is being delivered by Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime. That reduces Adobe's ability to make enough money on Flash to entrench it as a necessary tool for web video.

Apple's ability to disrupt the status quo in video playback is evident in its deal with Google to vend YouTube videos to the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Apple TV as straight H.264 rather than Google's existing mix of a Flash-based player and its archaic GVI file format based upon AVI. The BBC similarly moved to support Apple's products by serving up standard H.264 video to them.