Adobe Flash: The slow agonising death could happen in two years!

It is expected that Adobe Flash might be ‘dead’ in the next two years. A report by Encoding  stated that Flash made up only a mere 6 percent of mobile and web videos for 2015. Flash began as a central part of the internet as the service was used to watch videos, play interactive games and much more. But with emergence of new high-tech every year, Adobe might have to give up on Flash, once and for all.

The report points out, “While Flash is still being used for specific uses and edge cases such as banner ads and legacy browsers, it’s days are numbered. Flash outputs decreased from 21 percent to 6 percent in 2015. We expect to see the Flash video codec disappear completely from our report with 24 months.”

Replacements? 

What could displace Flash from its eminent place? Even though Flash is present on a few (popular) websites, the alternative opted for is HTML5. Slowly and steadily, most websites are migrating flash content to HTML5, wherever possible. An earlier report pointed out that a few had agreed with Google and others when it said that Flash would never go away because too much existing content was built on it. However, things seem to have changed.

Currently, H.264, which has been around for roughly 13 years, is the leading video codec, making up a 72 percent in video content for the previous year. H.264 is compatible with just about every device out there, whether it is your smartphone or the PC. The next growing codec is WebM, which grew by roughly a third in 2015 and is emerging as a leading method for delivering HTML5 video to Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

What happens to Flash-running sites?

If the report by  Encoding  does actually turn out to be true, many streaming sites would have to change their distribution format, in many ways. For instance, some of the sites which still reply on Flash Player are Hulu, HBO Go, CBS, NBC, MLB.TV, Showtime, Pandora, Spotify and others. The problem though is that many of these companies, which are now relatively dominant in their own ways, had opted for Flash in their initial days. And having scaled significantly, they could face several obstacles in moving away from Flash. At the same time, many websites are mending their ways to adopt to new technologies.

It has been pointed out that in the past, Twitch switched to HTML5 for its video player and HTTP live streaming for the underlying stream. Amazon rolled out an HTML5 web video player around the same time while Netflix and YouTube have offered HTML5 players for the longest time, as do Google Play Music and Rdio.

Did Steve Jobs predict Flash’s future? 

In 2010, then Apple CEO Steve Jobs explained why Flash must go . In roughly 2000 words, Jobs pointed out six integral problems with Flash. What can be best described as a blog, ‘Thoughts of Flash’, stated that the most important reason is that “letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.”

He stated that the motive was simple. “We want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications.”

He concluded by agreeing that though the company wants to push Flash in to the PC business, the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards, areas where Flash falls short. His prediction, “new open standards such as HTML5, will win all mobile devices” seems to have gone right.

To die in 2018?

Though the survey does point out how Flash is almost gone, it’s probably the best thing to happen for HTML5, as it could be the most vital contributor to the open web. Maybe it’s time to move on from Flash and embrace what else is offered to us.