And I think your confusing Quicktime with Real. To me, that was the product that showed people streaming audio and video was going to work. And even when practically everyone had Real installed, the W3C sat on it's hands and didn't add media features to the base HTML standards.

Quicktime and Windows Media fought over the market share Real was leaving behind as it died off, but neither became the de-facto standard before Flash streaming took over.

I think the thing about Flash that annoys me the most is how CPU inefficient it is. Sure, it can do streaming video, but it's going to use enough of the processor to start spinning up fans in a modern day laptop. How they will get ti to reasonably run on a modern day mobile phone is a good question. I however wouldn't mind having it if it does give me access to a few more streaming media options as long as it does have an off switch.