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October 18, 2005
Birds-of-a-Feather
Went to a great Birds-of-a-Feather session last night with the "XD" -- Experience Design -- group. Seems like those guys have the best jobs in all of technology. They made this crazy cool demo at the keynote of a futuristic media management tool and store, which led me to a question that I asked them.
It seems like the thing that's holding Flash back from being the best cross-platform media development product is its extremely limited format support. Right now you can play Flash Video (FLV) and MP3, but not much else. Most of the content people are buying today is in DRM'ed WMV, WMA and AAC (and the FairPlay MOV from the iTunes Music Store), and that trend is only going to grow.
What I'd like to do is to be able to write a cross-platform media player -- better than Windows Media Player, better than iTunes -- that can play anything. The inability of Flash to read anything except a very limited set of media content is going to make that virtually impossible though.
The response from the Macromedia guys was basically that it wasn't likely to happen because of licensing and technology issues, which I understand. Still, it would be a real world-beater.
Posted by Lee Clontz at October 18, 2005 11:15 AM