But won't Advertisers use whatever is widely available. If YouTube had made some other streaming tech a must have, the advertisers would be all over that instead.
Is Flash disliked because it's Flash, or because advertisers use it?
Because of what it lets advertisers do: the popups, the flying things. I have Flash installed in IE on the laptop, just for those rare sites that (a) don't show you the content without Flash and (b) don't have competitors I can do business with instead. And for Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music, the one good thing ever done with Flash.
What makers of Flash did which was very clever (in an evil way), was to take advantage of their installed base of Shockwave viewers and their automatic updaters, to push out an unrelated streaming video codec -- which then meant they had the best installed base of a next-generation video format, so YouTube adopted it as their standard.
In a sane world (e.g. Linux) you'd be able to get the FLV video codec without the Shockwave Flash browser plugin, just as you'd be able to get the Quicktime video codec without the Quicktime player or Itunes.
If Flash comes to the Iphone, I hope it comes with a prominent, or failing that at least
effective, off-switch.
Peter
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