• View Chris Hock & Jim Guerard Discussing Flash Video (Live on SYS-CON.TV)

Macromedia's Executive Vice President and Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch was able in his FlashForward 2005 keynote to point to the shining example set by New York Times, which this week chose to create an entire experience around the story of death of Pope John Paul II. "It's very fun to watch people experimenting with Flash and continue to push that envelope," Lynch said.

Lynch reminded the San Francisco audience that no other technology has the kind of adoption levels that Flash player reaches with every release (estimated at an astonishing 98%). "We're the only technology that has that much reach in the world, he said. "We're in a great position, and we just keep innovating."

When the keynote moved on to Flash video, Macromedia's Mike Downey underlined how this high penetration is leveraged, so that when visitors to a site hit the "play video" button, that's what happens, it plays video, rather than taking you to a page where you have to pick a player and a speed to view the video.

"Streaming video should be seamless," Downey said.

Recently Macromedia's Chris Hock told MX Developer's Journal:

"Video has traditionally been handled very poorly on the Web. I think everyone is familiar with clicking on a video link only to be taken to a Web page asking you if you want '56' or '220' and asking if you want this format or that format. These are the types of poor user experiences we think can be improved with Flash video."

"A rather simplistic, but significantly better vision of the future is when we've reached a point where you click 'play' on a Web video and the thing just plays," Hock added. "No bandwidth questions, no buffering, no installing stuff. Just play the video."

Because Flash video provides publishers with complete creative control over the look and feel of the playback experience, verticals in which branding is important are moving towards Flash video, Hock explained. "We're seeing a lot of traction in media and entertainment, advertising and agency work, retail and consumer product marketing," he told MXDJ.