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Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Do Streaming Websites Still Use Flash?
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xchampion
 Posts: 370 Location: Idaho Falls, Idaho |
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Even if HTML5 is more expensive to implement these companies should still do it. They will be ahead of the curve and save them hassle in the future. Its exactly the same thing as companies still using windows xp. Heck Adobe already stopped supporting Flash a while ago so it baffles my mind why companies still use it. Even a illegal streaming site I know can use a html5 player then why can't these million dollar companies do it.
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maximilianjenus
Posts: 2911 |
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as someone who has worked on web development for over 10 years, sometimes being ahead of the curve is not worth it; in this particular part of the industry, a lot of times being ahead of the curve means climbing over a lto of difficulties, difficulties that will dissapear after very few years and then the curve will be flat and it will all just be smooth sailing.
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Utsuro no Hako
Posts: 1052 |
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And let's not forget the part where anytime you wanted to watch a video, you'd be prompted to upgrade the player software, install a new codec, reboot your computer twice, and then try to remember where the hell the video you wanted to watch was. |
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SilverTalon01
Posts: 2419 |
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I keep hearing that... and then I keep seeing my adobe flash player pop up and tell me there is an update. And apple on their flash hate... I remember a bunch of apple fan boys telling me that 'nothing uses flash anymore' and 'its not a big deal, you will never notice'. I got an iPad as a gift. First thing I did was connect it to wifi, second thing was to do a speed test to see how well the wifi worked (after such atrocities as PS3 wifi, I stopped taking it for granted it wouldn't be trash). Oh hey, speed test apparently uses flash. Now that iPad sits unused on a desk while I use a windows tablet that can literally do everything my desktop can. |
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azabaro
 SubscriberPosts: 254 |
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The SpeedTest web site uses Flash; that's why you use the native iOS app (yes, there is one and there has been for years). Really, pretty much any service that uses Flash will (if they intend to grow in an era of declining PC sales and growing mobile sales) end up writing native mobile applications, if only so performance of their services on mobile isn't dependent on some 3rd party. |
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pluvia33
 Posts: 196 Location: Dayton, OH, USA |
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I'm kind of curious if Amazon and/or Netflix have considered patenting their HTML5 security techniques so they could sell them to other companies. I know that could potentially help their competition, but it could also provide some nice cash as well (not that either company is particularly hurting for it).
I don't think this is a particularly strong point to make. As the article said, HTML5 streaming is pretty simple to do. The thing is, an illegal streaming site doesn't have the same concerns as a legitimate streaming site. HTML5 video streams are easy to rip and hard to protect; an illegal site typically couldn't care less if you rip their video since they don't have the rights to it anyway, but a legitimate site needs to protect their content. Most commercials are still in Flash and/or are hard to imbed into HTML5 videos; illegal sites don't typically use commercials in their videos, but many of the legitimate holdouts need them in order to stay in business. I would love to get rid of Flash as soon as possible (it needs updated ridiculously often for something Adobe has "already stopped supporting" a while back), but I can deal with it a bit longer if it's not feasible for everyone to change yet. |
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TheAncientOne
 Posts: 1896 Location: USA (mid-south) |
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The illegal streaming site doesn't have to worry about satisfying a licensor that they are doing something to try and protect the content licensed to them (because, of course, they've pirated it rather than licensing it). In most cases, the pirate site isn't even streaming the video or coding the player, but rather embedding a player from the video sharing website that the video has been uploaded to. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Warner Instant Archive's streaming still seems to be chained to MS Silverlight, which makes it easy to watch on desktop and tablet, but hard to adapt to more contemporary STB/game-console apps-- Which is too bad, as it would be good on PS3 with my other Flash/HTML5 based apps like Amazon and Netflix. |
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Pidgeot18
 Posts: 101 |
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I know the people who actually wrote some of the relevant stuff, so let me explain some of the more technical details.
HTML5 (the people who actually work on it hate the name, but that's a story of politics that's really irrelevant here) was originally designed in part to be a codification of how browsers were implemented and in part to escape the XHTML mess when attempting to propose new features--Web Forms 2.0 was the big one. Many of the original authors included people who hated Flash, and trying to design technologies to deprecate Flash was very much a goal of the community. Flash really is horrible for browser vendors--it was (and may still be, although I don't know how much of it has been mitigated by browser vendors hardening themselves against Flash at this point) the single biggest source of hangs and crashes in browsers, not to mention being a walking security hole. The original technology in question was a <video> tag, which brought up a very big codec war. Originally, Ogg Theora was required by the specification, but Apple and Nokia objected due to submarine patent concerns while Mozilla and Opera objected to H.264 due to license royalty fees. This caused the matter of codecs to be dropped by the specification (to much whining), and different vendors implemented different sets of codecs with no overlap. Google eventually introduced VP8 in Matroshka format (that's the .mkv string), and announced that they would drop H.264 support from Chrome, but after failing to do so well over a year later, Mozilla caved and implemented H.264 support at last. So it's only been about a year that you can actually include one video that works on all clients, despite it having been implemented by everyone for half a decade. Now, the saga of Encrypted Media Extensions is entirely different. It pretty much arises from the fact that the MPAA is very, very insistent that all streaming technologies prevent people from being able to save a copy of their stream to a hard drive. Never mind the fact that this is impossible, it puts companies like Netflix and Amazon in a tough position, because the browser vendors are desperate to kill Silverlight and Flash, the only two priorly extant ways of achieving this contractual obligation. And the entire debacle is made more complicated by the fact that everyone who's tasked with implementing it knows very well how pointless it is, but the people who are insisting it aren't even in the table (and won't listen to reason). |
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SilverTalon01
Posts: 2419 |
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I know there is an app for speedtest, but that isn't relevant to my point. The point was that despite all the apple fans saying how nothing uses flash and that I'd never miss it, it took less than 5 minutes to notice the difference and miss it. Sorry, but needing an app for every individual case is annoying... that is even assuming every single site I ever try to use that has flash will have an app. In fact downloading the app in itself is more annoying than necessary since I have to put my password in every single time I go to the app store, but I'm getting further away from the gripe that is relevant here (flash). I mean seriously, you're comparing (1) going to a website (2) being told to download an app (3) entering your password (4) downloading the app (5) installing the app (6) opening the app to simply going to the website and having it work? Seriously? I'm not saying Flash isn't crap and that it shouldn't get phased out. However, we aren't at a point yet where you won't notice not having it. |
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Paiprince
 Posts: 593 |
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Flash still has its use as a platform for mobile browser games (Kantai Collection, Touken Ranbu and others use it). Even if it's such a resource hog, it can manage, but as a video player there's just too many cons against it that the sooner streaming sites drop it and introduce their own proprietary players, the better.
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captain80
Posts: 1 |
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Most if not all of the platforms with viable HTML5 players do not have dynamically inserted video ads. The majority of video ad serving infrastructure was built for Flash players, hence why it became the defacto video player on the web in the 2000s.
YouTube has a HTML5 player which has an ad plugins, however Google has spent the last 4 years transitioning all of their ad serving platforms (both rich media and video) away from flash to HTML5. As other third party ad servers increase their support of HTML5, this should resolve fairly quickly. Finally, the amount of video consumed on a true desktop (outside of a work environment) is shrinking each day. Mobile, tablet and OTT platforms account for the majority of playback and will only increase. |
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AtoMan
Posts: 161 |
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...just be glad it's not Silverlight.
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AnimeAddict2014
 Posts: 925 |
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it will be a while before HTML5 can take over completely
i don't know if it's just my 4+ year old laptop or not I can't seem to watch 1080p video in HTML5 on my laptop without triggering the laptop fan to go to max speed mode for some reason. it's fine with flash though |
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Shay Guy
 Posts: 2337 |
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Does the copyright protection really make a difference? I mean, torrents of Netflix originals appear the day Netflix starts streaming them. And in general, you have to give the user the key to the encryption for them to be able to watch it in the first place.
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