The History of Flash Video
Flash technology was born ten years ago now, back in 1996. A couple of software developers named John Gay and Robert Tatsumi founded a company they named FutureWave Technologies. They created some software that used something called “vector graphics” to render graphic animations. Vector graphics wasn’t being used very much back then, and it was very fast and lightweight.
After several people suggested they make it into a browser plugin, they finally did just that. This allowed them to bring their technology to the masses, in a much larger scale than they had imagined.
THREE MILESTONES
There were three significant milestones that happened that contributed to what Flash has become today.
Initially, there was a challenge because there were so many companies marketing plugins that you needed a compelling reason to get a new one into the marketplace. Without content, nobody needed the plugin; and without the plugin, nobody was interested in content. A classic Catch-22 situation. The crafty developers solved this problem by paying Netscape to bundle their Flash player with Netscape Navigator (the dominant browser at the time).
The second big milestone happened when they launched Version 4 that included a scripting engine in the player that allowed people to create richer, more interactive content. This is the point where the use of Flash really took off.
The third and most recent milestone was reached with the introduction of Flash Video. The breakthrough here was the creation of a streaming communications server, and the means for the Flash script running in the browser to interact with the streaming server. Video was a natural fit, but the overall application is much wider than that.
Sunday 17 Sep 2006 | ToolWiz | Flash Videos, Video