JD on EP

Ryan Stewart has some observations on this too. I don't know Disney's schedule, but would be surprised if they specified a minimum Flash Player 8.5... it's 8.0 that has the On2 video codec, and the beta 8.5 is more oriented towards speeding processing power.

But if an audience member needs to update they'll get the current version... every recent Player includes the auto-update mechanism too. Should give us a further boost in consumer adoption rates, even though there may not be anything specific to Player 8.5 in that content.

(Here's a Technorati search on term "disney flash"... this doesn't catch all blogs, but does confirm the original observation that this all passed without comment by others.)

That's a good point about the auto-update feature. If companies like Disney are requiring 8.0 then it may speed the adoption of 8.5 just by the auto update mechanism. I don't believe that Disney is planning on requiring a minimum of 8.5 but if there is something compelling in the 8.5 release that makes the video better then who knows. Doesn't seem like we'll see that though.

Ubiquity of Flash, nuff said. :)

Guess they'll be using Flash Media Server 2?

8.5 is going to allow Linux users to view this stuff eh? (seeing no player 8.5)

Yeah, the first article didn't mention Flash that I noticed, and the second one almost mentioned it in passing. A commentor on my blog responded to my post on AOL's IN2TV service, that his company had done a proposal for that service using FLV, but had been beaten out by the windows media server bid, along with the idea that MS gave them some free servers to use. But Flash 8 FLVs just beat the pants off any other format in terms of quality and size and of course ubiquity. It's a no-brainer.

In the same vein as "talking about the technology that's interesting" vs. "what works and we don't", check out O'Reilly Radar's write up on EyeSpot.

They don't mention Flash (which handles the video), but what's even more hilarious is this line:

What distinguishes EyeSpot? It has to be more than just "we did it all in Javascript"--users don't typically care what tech is under the hood, so long as the job gets done.

Flash is already in that context; woot!

"nz", yes, the plan is to move the Linux Players directly to 8.5. I'm assuming that we'll be able to get identical video capability across all variants of these three operating systems, but I'll be happier once it ships.

Player 8.5 for Mac/Win is expected late spring, and my memory is that there was guidance that Linux would arrive a bit after that, although I don't have a citation at the moment.

(I haven't read Disney's announcements to see whether they detailed their streaming approach already... I don't know on the server, sorry.)