The reach of video on the web has been exponentially increasing, and these days you can find web video being used in a variety of creative ways. From YouTube to dynamic banner ads, you no longer have to search for Internet video, it just might be searching for you.

U.S. broadband use has doubled in the past 3 years, and now almost half of all Americans have broadband at home. The pervasiveness of high speed Internet connections is one of the factors fueling the online video explosion. Internet users are hungry for dynamic content, and want to be able to access it quickly and easily. Flash video has turned out to be the solution of choice for many video providers.

There are still a variety of other viable and popular web video technologies such as Quicktime and Windows Media, however, Flash is extraordinarily popular due in large part to the ubiquity of the Flash player across platforms and browsers, and the small file sizes and fast loading times of Flash videos.

Flash videos play in the same Flash player that other Flash animations use, and can be either progressive download (where you download the first portion of a file before it begins to play) or true streaming (using a streaming server). Virtually all video sharing sites such as YouTube, Google Video, Brightcove, Daily Motion, Blip.tv and others utilize Flash as their video format of choice.

You can still achieve excellent quality when compressing video to Flash, although there are, at present, a very limited number of codecs available for the format. Flash video is a display format, and files need to be converted to another format before they can be used in a video editing application, usually with a high cost in image quality.

Advantages to Flash video include the relative ease of creating a custom player for your website. When embedding another video format, such as Quicktime, in a web page, if you don’t want to use the standard Quicktime player provided by Apple, good luck (it’s technically possible, but the infrequency with which it’s done points to its extreme difficulty). In Flash, customizing the colors or controls can be much more easily achieved.

So, why would you use anything else? Well, at last check Flash does not support DRM or Digital Rights Management. Also, depending on the software and hardware used, Flash encoding can be far slower than encoding to other formats. Since Flash video is a more recent development than other formats, some may not have purchased or upgraded to the software necessary to create Flash videos quickly or easily. And if your audience includes those accessing video content from a mobile device like a phone, PDA or iPod, Flash still does not have wide compatibility for those devices.

Post your comments on Flash video below!

Leslye can be reached at leslye@reflectiondigital.com

P.S. Check out examples of Flash video in two of our Featured Media Guest columns here on DavidRyanMediaSolutions.com — links below:

http://davidryanmediasolutions.com/2008/01/04/audience-friendly-experimental-animator-eric-dyer/

http://davidryanmediasolutions.com/2007/11/10/one-man%e2%80%99s-vision-to-fight-poverty/