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Porn Industry Ready To Drop Flash
An anonymous reader writes "Here's an interesting new angle to the ongoing Flash-HTML5 debate. Digital Playground, one of the major adult film studios, said it would drop Flash today if all browsers were HTML5-ready (*cough*, IE8, *cough*). The company's founder said, 'Flash brings everything to a crawl and has an impact on battery life. With HTML5, there is no reason to show our content in Flash.' Digital Playground also indicated that it does not expect 3-D to gain mass acceptance any time soon."
I work in the Adult Industry on a Content Management System for paysites. We just demonstrated support for the iPad at the recent Xbiz show using H.264.
It's fine and dandy that one company has proclaimed that they'd get rid of Flash given the chance. That doesn't say much for the rest of the industry, now, does it?
I know there are a lot of Open Source Advocates on Slashdot, but let's face it: Paysite operators are in the game to maximize their profits. This is done by:
a) Reaching as many people and devices as possible.
b) Decreasing bandwidth
c) Minimizing disk space and hardware.
They don't care about the war between WebM and H.264. They only care about having their sites work with as many people as possible. In this case, HTML5 brings iPad support to their sites.
The problem here ultimately is that the codec war with HTML5 is still undecided. If you're going to use HTML5's video element exclusively, you're going to end up being FORCED to use two formats of video for all the browsers - one for WebM and one for H.264.
That's all well and good, but multiple formats takes up space. Granted a lot of pay sites offer multiple download options like WMV, DivX and Quicktime, but when it comes to watching a full movie in a browser, only one format is needed here - H.264. Let the browsers that support H.264 use the video tag. Let browsers that don't use a Flash player backup.
This still won't change after WebM has support within Flash because of the iPhone and iPad. As the mobile arena heats up, WebM will start to appear lacking without Apple support. Even though the iPhone is a small percentage of the total phone market, it says a lot when the CEO has one and wants his websites to work on it.
So in sum - flash isn't going anywhere. It will remain as a backup player for 5 years mininum.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Yes. The porn factor is an urban legend. The real reason was that VHS had two hour tapes, and betamax one hour. People choose the ability to record complete sport matches over picture quality.