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May 20, 2006
ABC video results
ABC video results: Exceeded expectations. Has implications for application development. "Since the project was launched about three weeks ago, 3 million episodes have been downloaded from ABC.com, according to Iger. 'Consumer demand has been incredible,' he said." The Reuters version was linked on TechMeme, but lacked this earlier MarketWatch angle of Iger's perception of those stats. Implications? Not only can people easily view video on computers now, but people do... the public is adapting to that media type very rapidly... there's great pull. There's also great push, with video being produced by more and more of the population, and the barriers to web video removed. Some applications will remain just text, but video costs are plummeting, and user expectations are escalating -- an engaging application will beat out a boring one, natural selection. But fortunately the tooling is advancing to match... there's a certain XML UI language, which has advanced beyond the enterprise, with free production and delivery to the widest range of computers... Flex 2 treats video as a first-class citizen in its markup. The costs of using static video are now near zero. The integration into people's computer experience will, over the next two years, almost certainly surge. The ABC results are a marker on that road, I think.
Posted by John Dowdell at May 20, 2006 06:58 AM
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One more angle, on the numbers. ABC.com had three million downloads in its first three weeks. The Adobe Flash Player 8 is still adding five million successful installations each day.
That's how it reached 70%+ consumer viewability only six months after release.
The capabilities are spreading fast.
Posted by: John Dowdell at May 20, 2006 07:48 AM
Great post, JD - but I'm confused if this is a prediction or a description. Did ABC use Flex 2 in its implementation? Or has another media property done so yet? How do your claims here compare to Microsoft's promise of Expressions?
BTW - I couldn't agree more that the more sophisticated/high quality user experience will trump UG generated myspace style video anyday, and that this (plus metadata) is the killer app--
Posted by: Megan Cunningham at May 20, 2006 10:44 AM
No, sorry Megan, I was still working on my first coffee... Danny Mavromatis has info on how it was created, and I don't see that he has had bandwidth for the Flex 2.0 beta yet. I don't know whether any video portal would use these standardized interface elements... it's more that the strong reception to practical internet video will have an eventual effect on business interfaces too.
Posted by: John Dowdell at May 20, 2006 11:17 AM
Flex 2 XML UI language is really an application framework though. I hope one of these days there's a broader Flash XML UI language (for normal rich media flash stuff etc) and Flex MXML sits on top of it.
Posted by: nz at May 20, 2006 03:17 PM