Apple iPhone's To Support Flash Video Very Shortly

Some folks who work closely with the iPhone product line are telling me that iPhones will support Flash video playback very shortly. While I know there has been a lot of speculation about Flash video on the iPhone not being possible due to battery constraints and other technical rumors, the only real thing stopping it from working is an agreement between Apple and Adobe.

While I don't personally have an iPhone, getting Flash video adoption on the handset will go a long way in helping to make video a lot more portable for handsets. Yes, many phones already do video, but iPhone users amongst all others are always very adamant about showing what the phone can do and the moment it does Flash video, you'll see a lot of iPhone users showcasing that to anyone who wants to watch.

UPDATE: I am already getting a lot of questions about what "very shortly" means and it's a valid question. The answer is I don't know for sure, but based upon who told me the info to begin with, I took it to mean this quarter.

Comments

[shaun]

i'm guessing the traditional apple CDN akamai would be the one responsible for ensuring all these new flash videos go smoothly?

[Tim Siglin]

Is this support for Flash as a whole or just for Flash Video (ie, FLV and the new F4V)?

[HD-Productions.biz]

I used to be able to play flash rendered videos back in quicktime on a mac or pc and was a little peed of when they disable this or took it away.

As Quicktime is the multimedia architecture that handles all media related files, you would assume that the I-Phone and relate Mac products should be able to handle this as standard and would be part of the phone anyway.

You can read the disgruntlement below shared by others.

http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2006/09/surprise_quicktime_713_disable.html

http://www.hd-productions.biz

[James Meeker]

It will be interesting to dive further to establish what this means at a codec level. Will it support Flash9 (H.264) or will it utilize the VP6 codec? Another interesting question for this source is when will Apple enable the streaming component to the version of Quicktime which is on the iPhone? At this time, it is impossible to stream live to the iPhone, it only handles file based playback now.

[99alf]

there is a solution to play all flash videos on your iPhone and iPod — its free - and it works. Great! Now i can visit all videopages with video content and can watch them right on my iPhone.
http://videohamster.com/ipod

[Jose Herrera]

the iPhone will play the videos on apple.com...so im trying to figure out what format theyre in so maybe other videos online will play??