David Gerard wrote:
Are you *sure* we can't put a narky message when iPhone users click a video? Adobe do!
(assuming it's real - can anyone with an iPhone please check?)
Adobe is the most feared company on the web right now.
Even though Microsoft has the most popular browser, a number of excellent alternatives exist: Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konquerer, and Chrome. They don't support 100% of what IE supports, but you can browse the web all day with them and rarely find a site that they don't work with.
There are no entirely satisfactory replacements for Flash and Acrobat, and certainly not cross-platform and widely installed.
On top of all that, Apple and Microsoft both have personal vendettas against Adobe.
Five years ago web video was buried beneath a three-way battle between the MicrosoftOnlyMediaPlayer, TheRealBadMediaPlayer, and TheQuicktimeMediaPlayerThatWorksOccasionally. Publishing video online would typically mean creating files for all three players, and probably at 2-4 different quality levels, so you might have 6-12 files. Then there would be a complex hunk of javascript that would try to guess which player you had, which would work right... if you were lucky.
Then there was the whole codec nightmare; even if you had the right player, you probably didn't have the right codec. Although there were supposedly mechanisms for installing new codecs, you'd usually risk wrecking your ability to play video at all if you tried to install a codec.
Macromedia (later aquired by Adobe) quietly introduced video capability in Flash... It was a few versions later when Flash video players were widespread, and then all of a sudden people realized that web video could be as simple as pushing "Play" and having the video really play.
Apple and Microsoft, both of whom have ambitions to control digital video, will never forgive Adobe.