Behind Flash Video
Chris Hock - Macromedia's Director of Product Marketing


Does Flash Video works? We believe it does! Macromedia recently launched a new service called Flash Video Service. Their objectives were to provide a platform that can stream Flash Video files, and make it available to the average user. We met with Chris Hock, Director of product marketing at Macromedia, to talk about Flash Video, the Flash Communication Server, and the advantages of using this new exciting technology.


FSW: Congratulations to the great success of Flash video recently. It seems we're moving slowly into a new area of web video and we're glad that you're doing this interview with Flashstreamworks.
What do you think is the most important success of Flash video in 2004?

Chris Hock: We've had a tremendous amount of success in the last year with Flash video spanning many different aspects of the business -from partnerships with our Flash Video Streaming Service partners VitalStream and Speedera to seeing great video experiences such as Amazon Theater on Amazon.com come to life. It would be hard to identify the single most important success.


FSW: What are the biggest streaming events so far?

Chris Hock: Earlier in the year, we announced that Carat Interactive used Flash video to deliver the "Impossible is Nothing" campaign for adidas featuring female boxer Laila Ali and her legendary father, Muhammad Ali. The video ad delivered more than one million plays in a single day. You can read more about this here: http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/2004/vitalstream.html

Events such as "Impossible is Nothing" that garner over a million visitors viewing streaming Flash video are becoming more and more commonplace as Flash video adoption continues by leading media and entertainment companies and web portals such as comcast.net, cnet.com, sbc.yahoo.com, discoverychannel.com, biographychannel.com, and countless others.


FSW: How high is the current penetration of Flash video compared to other media formats like Windows Media, Real Player or QuickTime?

Chris Hock: One of the biggest contributors to the success of Flash video is the ubiquity of the Macromedia Flash Player. Macromedia Flash Player is the world's most pervasive software platform, used by over 1 million web professionals and reaching more than 98% of Internet-enabled desktops worldwide as well as a wide range of devices- this is over 30% higher than the penetration of the next closest media player. Additionally, the Flash Authoring Tool is used by over 1 million professionals to create rich internet content such as Flash video.

You can find survey results about the penetration of Macromedia Flash Player as well as other various media players here: http://www.macromedia.com/software/player_census/flashplayer/


FSW: Streaming companies are slowly realizing the importance of Flash video for traditional video streaming. Will Macromedia release an official Video Player similar to Real Player or Windows Media to deploy Flash video easily on the web?

Chris Hock: We think we have a great model that really works for enabling our customers to deliver video with the best possible end-user experience to the widest audience in the most cost-effective, trouble-free manner. Our customers are able to do this because Macromedia Flash Player is widely distributed, cross platform compatible and very small and unobtrusive.

I think building a large, bulky, 9 to 12MB player that people had to download and install wouldn't help our customers solve the problems they encounter when deploying video to the web.