A couple of days ago, Microsoft announced that they would adopt Adobe’s Flash Lite for mobile devices. This was smart, for two reasons: one is perceptive and another is strategic.
On the mobile front, MSFT is gaining traction:
- By adopting Flash Lite, its mobile strategy adds more utility;
- Apple adopted its Mobile OS for the iPhone in a clear attempt to wage war against Research In Motion’s Blackberry, but it also gives MSFT a foothold in the burgeoning handheld computing, wireless entertainment and mobile advertising space.
But on the Web - where advertising will become a $51B market in the US alone by 2012 - I can’t help but scratch my head.
Why? The next four years’ growth will be driven by video. Yet in video, MSFT seems clueless.
Today, I was scanning the online video landscape and decided to stop by MSN’s video platform, which I presume is Soapbox. I say presume, because for the love of me I can’t tell how MSN Video is different than Soapbox. By the sound of it, one would guess that Soapbox is the UGC site, right?
Who knows. It’s a shame that MSFT seems confused about its video strategy - like Yahoo! fittingly - because MSNBC.com is a leader in video streams. So why is MSN.com not a leader in video? Who knows. One reason? Their reluctance to use Adobe’s Flash. MSFT has Silverlight, but Flash is ubiquitous (reference: YouTube).
Anyway, memo to MSN Video, why don’t you allow for flash files?
Accepted file types: AVI, ASF, WMV, MOV, MPEG 1/2/4, 3GP, 3G2, DV, QT, DivX and Xvid.
Hmm… That seems off. If you want to be relevant in video and turn your back on flash files, that is pretty backwards.
Video’s biggest obstacle is that there remains a lot of friction in the ecosystem. I could write a book (note to self: do that) on the friction in video content and advertising…
MSFT could help reduce some of that, but somehow I think that by pushing Silverlight it will reduce it.
Because of that, instead of seamlessly enjoying 35 magical clips on NCAA classic basketball programming, we have to do them slowly… Here’s the first one: enjoy Michael Jordan at UNC here, embedded below:
Video: Michael Jordan - Greatest College Basketball Players
Subscribe:
March 19th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Ummm.. the videos on MSN play back in Flash not Silverlight. Why would you want to upload a highly compressed Flash file to be recompressed in Flash? Where would you license a Flash decoder to do this?
From YouTube:
YouTube accepts a wide range of video file formats such as .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG transferred from most digital cameras, camcorders, and cell phones.
March 19th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Most videos play back in flash, I was not referring to that. My reference was clearly to uploading functions. I do, however, see your point on uploading an already compressed version.
My point mainly had to do with uploads and hence the “reduce and do not add friction”.
I was referring to flash having become a widely used format for amateur, prosumer and professional video creators… the fact that MSN does not allow you to upload a flash file adds friction.
We publish on WatchMojo and then syndicate to 100s of spots… MSN is not a spot we can seamlessly syndicate to. Over time, as YouTube does 1 out of 3 streams etc., MSN Video becomes a has-been.
The fact that they internally do not even know what site to push means that they cannot even leverage their traffic, but that’s another point.
March 19th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Who accepts Flash as an upload format (see YouTube statement above)? Where did they license the decoder?
March 19th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
These days, indeed a few sites, services and tools do not accept flash.
However, many do.
The output version quality does not necessarily need to suffer. There are other variables at play, format is but one variable.