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June 10, 2004
Streaming Video: Just One of Many Amazing Features
There's a good article on streamingmedia.com called "Taking Care of Business, In a Flash" that talks about using Flash to stream video, and how the experience differs from QuickTime, Windows Media Player, and Real. It's a quick read, but I think the article makes some important points. The focus of Flash video is not purely quality and efficiency (although I don't see either as lacking) as much as it is experience, and the ability to integrate video seamlessly and without boundaries into your work. Generally speaking, I think that's what makes Flash such an amazing development tool for so many different projects. There's no other development platform that I know of that makes the integration of so many different element and technologies so easy and so amazingly flexible. It's actually pretty astounding to think about everything that Flash supports now, like:
- Web services and Flash Remoting
- Streaming audio and video
- Socket connections
- XML
- An object-oriented scripting language (ActionScript 2.0)
- UI Components
- Simple and fluid animations
And then when you consider all the platforms that support the Flash player and all the amazing things products like Flex, Breeze and even ColdFusion do with Flash, it starts to become clear not just how much impact Flash has already had on the web, but more importantly, how well positioned it is to drive the direction of the web in the future.
Posted by cantrell at June 10, 2004 10:42 AM | References