Karsten, Your experience/decision doesn't appear to be congruent with a large swath of iOS users that want instant access to Flash video from their iOS devices ala Skyline.
Frankly, it's very unusual in the business space to see a company (Apple/Steve Jobs) to demonstrate such disdain for the way customers want to make use of said company's products. Most companies are motivated to satisfy their customer base instead of relentlessly frustrate them. (This whole phenomena is worthy of being a case study in business school.) Hmm, I wonder if there would be a way for Skyline to even proxy access to DRM Flash video sites? Might be some licensing/legal issues in trying to do that, though... I recently had an experience this past week-end regarding Apple that tends to correlate with what their doing to iOS customers regarding Flash (i.e., go out of the way to frustrate customers). My son's MacBook had a problem with being unable to mount its harddisk. I bought a new harddisk, installed and put the original OS on (Tiger OS X 10.4). I successfully used a data recovery program to retrieve all his data - so far so good. I went to run iTunes, which happened to be version 7. I could access his music files but was unable to connect to the iTunes store. So I downloaded latest version 10 iTunes client. I went to install and was promptly told I need to have version 10.5 or greater OS. This was entirely surprising as Tiger is really not that old of a OS release and lots of Mac users still run Tiger. I had to back off and install version 9 of iTunes, which is the last supported version for Tiger. This was tremendously surprising as there is no technical reason that iTunes client could not continue to support Tiger. The network protocols it relies on are one of the constants of nature, practically speaking. This is born out that the latest iTunes for Windows continues to support XP/Vista/Win7. Ironically you can run ten year old Windows XP and get the latest iTunes but if you're running Tiger you'll now forever be on iTunes 9. The next day I go with my other son to purchase a wireless access point to connect to my Apple Airport base station Extreme (he needed to get his XBox connected to the Internet). We decide to buy the Apple Airport Express - thinking by doing this would be the most painless way to get it connected to my base station Extreme and establish a wireless access point for the XBox. The Airport Admin v5.5.1 utility that came on the disk only supports Mac OS X 10.5 or greater. I only have Tiger OS 10.4 as far as Macs go, so again I was out of luck. As a Tiger user I'm no longer able to buy new Apple products and configure them for use with my other Apple products. So I switch to my Sony laptop running Windows Vista and download Airport Admin v5.5.1 for Windows. Ironically, once again Apple is giving better support to Windows users than it is to its own Mac OS X users. Sadly, though, I was never able to get the Airport Express to connect to my Airport base station Extreme. I have five other wireless products that are successfully connected to it, including DLink wireless access point. We gave up, to the Airport Express back and got a Microsoft XBox 811n wireless adapter, got back home and had the XBox online in about 10 minutes. We were both really impressed with how customer friendly Microsoft's products are relative to Apple's. Apples stuff is designed for the initial impact. Yet owning their products over the years can turn into frustration city. They very quickly slash and burn the past leaving their would-be loyal customers high and dry. On Nov 9, 8:20 am, Karsten Silz <[email protected]> wrote: > On 8 Nov., 19:07, RogerV <[email protected]> wrote: > > > In the general web browsing I do, when I encounter a site that has > > embedded video, greater than 90% of the time that video is provided as > > Flash video. > > > Which means if I was using, say, an iPad to do my web browsing, > > roughly 90% of the video I encounter and want to access, I would not > > be able to - without a solution such as Skyfire. I can easily see why > > Wrong. When you see Flash video on a site doesn't mean that iOS users > can't get to it. The iOS mobile Safari detects Youtube videos and > opens them in the Youtube app. Two sites I frequently visit (Spiegel > Online, Germany's biggest news portal, and Gametrailers) show videos > as H.264 on iOS devices. I guess the reason why these "dual video > sites" show you Flash on your PC is that their Flash video players > show ads and give them analytics results (e.g., how long you watched > the video and if you skipped any part) - data you don't get when the > iOS movie player shows an H.264 page. I think I Apple is extending > its iAd system to video to at least show ads. > > In general, about half of all online video is now available as iOS- > friendly H.264 (http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/10/27/ > more_than_half_of_online_h_264_videos_are_now_in_ios_friendly_html5.html). > Especially the iPad is heavily used for surfing and passed - in one > statistic - all Android devices in web browsing market share after > three months on the market (http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/ipad- > blasts-past-android-in-usage-share/8829). Android has grown rapidly > since then, but so has iPad, so I think the relationship here probably > holds up. > > That said, I still come across Flash-only video on some sites > (comingsoon.net); I save such pages to Instapaper. It would be more > convenient if I had a Flash Player on my iPhone / iPad that I could > enable on demand, but this probably will never happen. The important > thing is that at least for me (and based on sales numbers, for many > other users), this isn't a killer criterion (anymore). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
