Today it's just some spamware reusing that old trademark, but it was the first popular streaming video implementation on the web.
Before that we mostly had server rendered video frames on a meta refresh timer, like Netscape Fishcam (https://www.fishcam.com/). Netscape was the commercial predecessor to Mozilla, the browser/company that eventually made Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.
And before that you kinda sorta had ASCII graphics, sometimes with color, sent over direct modem connections to your local BBS. (And Gopher was in there somewhere in between)
I feel old.
It was over a hotrodded connection at 16600 baud.
I thought, "this will never work" while the download took several minutes.
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The night I spent watching videos of Tsunami footage in 2004, was the first time web video felt usable...that was through a cable modem.
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HTML5 was web standards catching up with reality. But that's always been the case with HTML standards because businesses develop technology to do what needs doing and eventually, it makes sense for everyone to do it the same way.
Way before Flash, most people had Windows and HTML comes with hyperlinks.
These go way back.
Decades ago, the Windows Media Video (.wmv) file extension was "associated" by default with Windows Media Player (WMP), the built-in Microsoft media player.
So you double-click on a WMV file, then it automatically opens WMP and plays your media according to the settings you have in WMP.
You could also associate other types of media files with WMP, so those type files would also launch the player. But WMP would only play the formats for which you have installed the proper codecs. WMV format file support was just naturally included for everybody with Windows.
OTOH you could install an additional media player like VLC and associate different file extensions with either player as you would like. So you weren't actually stuck with WMV that bad, if you had the codecs. And VLC had a lot of different codecs included, still does.
And still today, with something like Legacy WMP, new Microsoft MP, or VLC set to open when you double-click on one of your MP4 files for instance, there is naturally no browser needed. But if a link on a web page is single-clicked when it points to a similar MP4 which is posted on the internet, it will work too. Won't play in the browser of course without embedding and stuff, it'll just play the normal way, popping up in its separate media player window. Alternatively, you could just right-click and download the MP4 and play it later, this was common for those who did not have the bandwidth to smoothly play it as it streamed in, like on dial-up.
Flash arose as a low-performance alternative, intentionally compromising the animation or motion picture to use less bandwidth without being too ugly when played at the same rate the data comes in over dial-up.
With the
Here's a 2015 article referencing YouTube dropping flash for it's HTML5 player: https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/27/7926001/youtube-drops-fla...
The article touches on the challenge of getting to that point.