Flash!

"Adobe announced its new Flash Media Server 4.5 late Thursday afternoon, and it’s an iteration that Apple device owners should be very happy about. For the first time, Flash Media Server now enables same source video delivery to both Apple devices and Adobe Flash-compatible destinations.

 

Basically, Adobe is acknowledging that Apple has won when it comes to Flash."

That's all you heard when iPad launched: "But it won't play Flash movies". Flash has often been derided as a bloated resource hog that would eat through your iDevice battery in 15 minutes. Jobs said Flash was responsible for 90% of all application crashes on Mac. Yet it was and is very popular.

 

But there are better solutions, such as the free and open HTML5 video standard that plays movies just as well and uses far fewer resources - and it doesn't require a plug-in because it's built into your browser. Those play just fine on iPad.

So with iDevices (iPhones, iPads, iPods) now numbering in the hundreds of millions, Adobe had to do something or lose web video entirely.