clarifying the NPD consumer audits, Flash Player 9, etc.
Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote:
> I thought Flash only had about 90% saturation (not 98%).
Depends on the audience you're measuring. NPD/MediaMetrix asks their
regular consumer focus groups "open up your browser to this page, can
you see it? how about this next page?" and so on.
SWF files with the On2 video codec could be viewed by about 70% of
consumers tested, six months after the release of Adobe Flash Player 8.
The Sorenson codec, in Flash Player 6 and above, were viewable by over
95% of consumers tested.
Your site's particular audience, however, may stray from general
consumer norms either way... some sites target early adopters, other
sites target people with locked machines. Varies.
(I think part of the prior discussion may have been about "bookmarking"
parts of a video stream, which is definitely possible, but the mechanics
may differ depending on which implementation you'd prefer.)
Stan Hirson, Sarah Jones wrote:
> But. And it is a big butt. You need a Flash 8 Player to look at Flash
> 8 video. It is a plugin for the browser, but there have been many,
> many, problems with the upgrade for IE on Windows for people who are not
> computer literate. Adobe has been dreadful about promoting the players
> for the general public.
I'm not sure what you might be talking about here. I don't have a big
butt, for one thing. ;-)
Internet Explorer issues? I know of two, neither serious: there's the
whole "click to activate" thing which has been discussed to death, and
they had some updates for older operating systems awhile back which
tried to install a patch FP6 or whatever atop current FP8, hassling some
people. Neither issue had much of an impact, though.
> While it is true that adoption rates for Flash 8 are climbing, none of
> the major aggregators such as Youtube, Google Video, etc. are streaming
> Flash 8. If you want to see what computer chaos would be like, imagine
> what would happen if they converted.
I suspect most of them settled on their specs quite a few months ago.
AOL's video service goes directly to SWF8 format. I think most of the
others are at SWF7, but it can be hard to disentangle the source of each
one to see which minimum version they're specifying.
Now that SWF8 is at 70%+ consumer viewability, though, I expect most new
revs will go there directly.
> Now Adobe is making noise about a Flash 9 player coming out very soon.
> Does that mean that Flash 8 will be replaced? It only came out in
> September of 2005.
The Adobe Flash Player 9, now in public beta, will go into general
distribution very soon. Its improvements are mostly in script speed and
ECMAScript 4 compliance, with order-of-magnitudes improvements in
logical processing:
http://oddhammer.com/actionscriptperformance/set4/
No video changes, though. I don't see that the introduction of FP9 will
have an effect on folks here on this list.
Thanks for the side-by-side video comparison on your site. I wouldn't
worry about people scared of updating, however... we've been seing a
steady five-million-per-day successful installation rate the last
half-year... there has been nothing like this in the history of the
internet.
LeanBackVids.com wrote:
> Before we continue to debate the various versions of Flash, can
> someone post hard numbers for the penetration rate of Quicktime and
> Windows Media?
Not version-by-version, no, and not even by general architecture. The
NPD/MediaMetrix consumer audits on the Macromedia site just presented
people some old QT & AVI files (version 3 of each, I think, although WMP
may have been raised in the most recent test). How many people can see
the latest QuickTime codecs? No one really knows, so far as I can tell.
Markus Sandy wrote:
> that's a bit more like it, but I'm even skeptical about these figures
Being skeptical for the sake of being skeptical seems similar to being
faithful for the sake of being faithful.... ;-)
(iow, look at the evidence, please don't automatically discount a
speaker just because what they say also benefits them.)
jd
--
John Dowdell . Adobe Developer Support . San Francisco CA USA
Weblog: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd
Aggregator: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna
Technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/
Spam killed my private email -- public record is best, thanks.
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