Major Flash Player Upgrade | eLearning Impact of Flash vs. Silverlight

From What just happened to video on the web? a private blog written by an Adobe Engineer.

Flash Player 9 Update 3 comes to the rescue: MPEG-4 is an extremely well documented ISO standard and completely vendor independent. And by using the Flash Player now you get instant gratification for viewers.

This is important because of the impact we’ve been discussing of Silverlight within the LMS / eLearning space currently ‘oWneD’ by Captivate. While no capture tools currently support Silverlight, there are competitors to Captivate who are tied closely with Microsoft and challenging that quick-demo space.

There is a potential for Silverlight-based capture tools to impact eLearning in a big way particularly with the type of content which can be displayed. Development for Silverlight-compatible tools would be in the planning phases right now if it were determined to be compelling enough for distance learning and demos, particularly with companies who are intending to reuse current MPEG-4 content such as static training videos.

Tipping Point In Software Development | Newer Software Inherently More Manuverable

Again, from What just happened to video on the web? 

Why now? Short answer: Because you wanted it. Long answer: We’ve been working on this for a while and this was planned to be part of the next major revision of the Flash Player. What was unexpected was how impatient a lot of our customers are It seems many are trying to make choices when it comes to video technologies right now. [ed: my emphasis added]

We wanted to make sure that we would offer the best possible choices to them and set a signal that we are willing to embrace industry standards. No one believed that we would make this happen.

This is an important element to think about. Software development inherently has an issue with reaching the tipping point in features versus new innovation.

Look at this software positioning analysis: Can software get any better or is it stuck?

Let’s face it, most software companies have been doing a pretty good job and the applications that we have at our disposal today are immensely powerful. In fact, they may well be getting a little too powerful for their own good, for two reasons.

First, the more feature-complete an application is, the harder it is to innovate and add in features (try as people might, no one’s really been able to ‘build a better mousetrap’). Second, the better an application is, the less reason people have to upgrade anyway – because what they have is ‘good enough’.

In some cases, what they have is already far more sophisticated than they actually need.

This is the approach that MadCap Software has apparently taken with their MadPak items. Mimic is not as feature rich as Captivate, however the target market for the core product of Flare often doesn’t need the eLearning components, they just need a five to eight step procedure demo integrated into the help file.

 Here is another twist from Ethan Kaplan’s blog at BlackRimGlasses.com. Why is Ethan’s opinion important? He is the Head of Technology at Warner Bros. Records.

Here’s the interesting thing here: Flash Lite 3. Delayed. Consequence? Chumby, iPhone, etc - devices that depend on it, have rudimentary or no Flash support. iPhone and AppleTV consequently are relying on h.264 transcoded Flash videos from YouTube for their on-demand video content.

So what does H.264 support in Flash mean? It means that Flash Lite 3, Apple iPhones (and other devices that’ll use FL3) as well as further embedded devices will have high quality, pixel-perfect resolution videos using a good, open codec.

It also means YouTube might just make that transition to screen (via AppleTV and the like) sooner than you think. The chess pieces are there (handheld and set top computers reliant on H.264 as a prosaic stop-gap), and this is one of the final pieces of the puzzle.

The key to all this is, more content, better clarity, faster speeds.

Update: I ran across this post with a great analysis of what h264 does… To quote one of the comments, basically you can play Quicktime files with Flash Player now.

Adobe: This is Tipping Point for H.264

I spoke to Mark Randall, Chief Strategist for Dynamic Media at Adobe, about the news. He told me there were three main points to the Moviestar release:
1) The H.264 support means superior video quality; it is also an open standard.
2) High Efficiency Advanced Audio is, says Mark Randall, a “successor to MP3″. He said it is a higher quality audio, but at a lower bit rate.
3) It means “hardware acceleration” for Web video.
Randall also said that this represents a tipping point for the H.264 standard, because now Flash Player is supporting it as well Blu-Ray - two big industry players.