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December 26, 2007
Who's the four percent?
Who's the four percent? A December audit of consumer web capability shows that 95.7% of consumers tested already had Adobe Flash Player 9 installed. After eighteen months, almost everyone on the web now has fullscreen video and ActionScript 3 transparently available to them. And over the past twenty-four days we've seen nearly 200 million installations of the Player 9 Update 3, adding H.264 video, many optimizations, and the extremely meaningful Flex framework caching. Any survey of significant web trends needs to include this explosive improvement in clientside capability.
Posted by JohnDowdell at December 26, 2007 06:56 PM
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At the same time, there is a fast growing user base that is Flash-less: iPhone and other mobile devices, and PS3 and other embedded internet devices.
I would love to bring Hulu.com into my living room using my brand new PS3, but there is no (modern) Flash player for it.
Posted by: Jeremiah at December 27, 2007 08:08 AM
Let's hope the next version of the iPhone is more fully-featured, huh...? ;-)
(And no, that's not a hint -- Apple keeps everyone in the dark, but lord knows enough people have asked Jobs and Schiller for Flash.)
Perhaps five million Apple iPhones in the world, perhaps ten million by the end of 2008... three hundred million Adobe Flash Lite devices already, and a billion expected by 2010. People expect SWF rendering on their pocket devices today.
And even on large home screens we expect to be able to use today's World Wide Web, which means we expect standard SWF capabilities on gaming consoles and media centers too.
Just as printers converged on the Adobe PostScript service layer, newer devices benefit from predictable HTML, SWF and PDF capabilities. It's a disadvantage to a manufacturer to not support real world standards. The incentives are clear.
Posted by: John Dowdell at December 27, 2007 09:48 AM
When do you think we can expect to see a penetration stat for the H.264 capapble Flash update? I need to know if the visitors are capable of seeing it with a pretty good certainty before I deploy it.
[jd sez: I don't know. NBC's Hulu went to it on Day One of general distribution. The daily install rate was 8,000,000 through the summer, and I don't know whether it's gone up since then, but that would give us about 200 million by now.]
Posted by: Chad at December 27, 2007 07:34 PM
I agree that devices (er, users) certainly benefit from the Flash experience. I really want Flash on my iPhone and PS3.
The PS3 has officially supported Yellow Dog Linux since release over a year ago, but Adobe has not released a Flash player for Linux on the Power architecture. The situation is a disadvantage to Sony, but is this Sony's fault?
Manufacturers seem to be at the mercy of Adobe and there doesn't seem to be an economic incentive for Adobe to develop a player for every niche device that comes along.
Posted by: Jeremiah at December 28, 2007 11:54 AM