As per this New York Post story, Time Warner and NBC Universal are telling Apple that they are not going to retool for closed devices and are sticking with Flash as it “dominates the web”.
Media Giants To Apple: We Want Flash
3 responses to “Media Giants To Apple: We Want Flash”
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🙂 ..’nuff said
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Hi Ben,
it’s funny because I’ve read the mentioned article twice and I couldn’t find what you cited.
In fact, what I read is quite the opposite:
"they won’t retool their extensive video libraries to accommodate the iPad, arguing that such a reformatting would be expensive and not worth it because Flash dominates the Web."
That is to say: "we, the big media, won’t change from Flash (that is a closed and proprietary technology, if I’m not wrong) to html5 (that is an open standard) [because we already spent too much on that proprietary technology]"
Look, I’m not against Adobe; as a programmer I’ve been using ColdFusion for the last 7 years and as a graphic I use and like and teach InDesign and the all CS… But facts should be facts.
Touting Flash as a stalwart of the open, especially against web standards like HTML (and I’ll remind you that the WebKit is a big piece of open source itself, feels somewhat strange.
Different thing is developing iPad apps: but no one is forced to do that if they don’t want. But then, speaking of big media, I think the just released iPad version of Wired is a wonderful thing (and I’m really looking forward to the tools that Adobe will release for InD CS5).
Thanks
Edo -
Edo,
Not sure what you don’t see in the article. I summarized and said that specific media companies were not going retool (word taken from article), that Flash dominates the web (words taken from article), and referred to closed devices (reference to the walled garden comment in the article).
I did not mention Flash being open or not at all. Although, just to be clear, Flash is far more open than Apple and others would like you to believe. While Flash Player is not open source, parts of it are, the SWF format is public and others are allowed to use their own tools to create SWF files (unlike iPhone/iPad apps), other may create their own players, and we even open sourced the Flex compiler so you can build Flash apps without paying us a dime. So, no, I am not "touting Flash as a stalwart of the open", but I am most definitely not buying Apple’s supposed openness. Sure, use HTML5 to gloss over draconian application approval and removal process, play license games to control which tools are used … there is nothing open about Apple or the iPhone/iPad OS. And while Apple has the right to run their business as they see fit, it’s worth remembering that they make decisions for business reasons, and business reasons only. Apple, like just about any company that is required to return value to shareholders, loves open so long as that openness is in their best interests. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but, as you said, "facts should be facts".
And sure, I know that the media companies have their own interests at heart, this is business, not altruism. The post was merely to point to an interesting story, interesting because while some companies feel the need to bend over backwards for the will of Apple, others are not going to.
— Ben
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