Video advancement on Internet with Macromedia Flash

Macromedia Flash can be truly termed as the current catalyst for the growth of video on the internet. Not only it did the most remarkable contribution to the growth of video on the Internet but also the advancement in quality and compression from earlier version to the Flash -8 and current Flash-9 version was so huge that it made all the difference to internet users and the current scenario where we have video bursting to the seams all across the net.

Popular sites like youtube, break, metacafe, ifilm, hotclips all benefited from this advancement in storing video as also serving them from regular servers instead of high cost streaming servers as used earlier. Though Windows Media controlled about 60% of the Market share for Internet video formats, Flash came up to occupy the second position from almost nothing to 19% share - which is predicted to growth much further this year.

The best part of flash is the cross browser compatibility - which effectively means that a windows user and a mac/apple user now have the same video experience - and you need not build two different website with two different applications and host two different streams for both the systems.

Adobe which picked up stocks in Macromedia worth 3.4 Billion US$ last year, currently claims that nearly 98% of the PC's worldwide have Flash viewer installed as against 85% for Windows Media player ... which is not only correct but an true pointer to the effectiveness of a genuine utility software.

Another important fact is Flash also minimizes the piracy and copyright issues as nothing stored on the end users PC. However the best part of Flash is still the compression factor which sabed millions of dollars in terms of hosting, bandwidth and storage costs.