Some basic ramblings about Flash Lite, it’s potential and Macromedia’s gameplan with the player distribution follow. They aren’t particularly planned or structured so bear with me…
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If you’ve read my previous post about Flash Lite 1.1 and it’s associated comments then you’ve probably gathered I’m fairly frustrated about this news from Macromedia. I’ve been thinking a fair bit about it’s potential and thought it would be a good idea to lay out exactly why I think the new release, and mobile Flash in general, is such an important development.
Mobile phone usage is changing a lot. The shift started happening in Japan first off some years ago – Howard Rheingold and others (like Mimi Ito) have written about this at length – when people started using their mobile phones for more data oriented tasks as opposed to just voice calls. This trend is being seen in other areas now too with Europe fast catching up with data-centric mobile usage. Interestingly the US has been slow to show the same shift, but a few months ago the final of Pop Idol USA saw the US overtake Europe for the number of text messages sent as people voted using their mobile phones and SMS in record numbers. With people shifting towards such data-heavy mobile usage operators are having to think more and more like content providers and about how they can further encourage more data throughput on their networks. It’s this trend that makes mobile Flash so exciting and full of potential…
Love it or loath it, Flash is huge. There are thousands of skilled Flash developers out there. The community behind them is vast too. Flash is everywhere and becoming very adept at finding serious uses for data visualisation and interface creation as time goes on. Since the inception of the mobile Flash player in Japan last year (Flash Lite 1.0) it’s usage has been adopted with amazing speed and companies like Disney Japan can now count Flash content as a very large chunk of their mobile offering.
Flash on a mobile phone offers a perfect platform with which to develop rich, data driven content. Rather than clicking through a list of textual based links, through the phone’s browser a user can be interacting with specifically designed interfaces for the application in hand. For instance, let’s consider a mapping application: how would this work on current phones? A static graphic that has scroll and zoom functions maybe? But when you click to perform one of those actions all you’re doing is loading up another graphic according to the user’s choice. It might just about work, but it’s too clunky to be really usuable in my opinion. If you take the same application in Flash though, suddenly you can scroll in real time; zoom on demand; add and take away map features depending on your needs; the list could go on… Flash would provide the perfect rich environment for something like this to work on a mobile phone, and what better type of application to have on your mobile than a real time mapping app!?
If we strip away the evangelistic brainstorming of potential applications though, and concentrate on the bottom line instead, you’ll see that mobile Flash still makes perfect sense. Operators want to drive data over their networks right? Data means chargeable revenue to them after all. Users want to be able to access timely, rich content of the type they want, when it suits them. Rich, suitable content means users will start to consume more and more right? Content owners want a way of delivering their offering in an attractive way, with minimal development/conversion costs. The Flash development platform is cheap, and fairly easy to master, can re-use assets already created for other types of online distribution and most significantly offers a major reduction in the time needed to create content over other platforms such as Java. So, like I said at the top of this bit, even when you look at the bottom line mobile Flash makes perfect sense.
I’m not suggesting that mobile Flash is the saviour of all things mobile. I’m not suggesting that basic html, graphics and Java apps will be replaced by Flash either. But I really do think, given a chance, mobile Flash will change the way people use their mobiles even more and drive users to consume content at an increased rate. To my mind it’s what the mobile platform has been crying out for. The potential is vast.
The only sticking point as far as I can see at the moment, is Macromedia’s method of player distribution. There is little information available about their intentions but from what I can gather they intend to license the player to companies in some way. So, if Orange wanted to have a Flash game distributed with their handsets for instance, they would license the player from Macromedia in some way. I’ll have to wait to see how this works out before really passing judgement, but at the moment I think this is a big mistake. Flash got huge because of the player ubiquity – and this is what they need to achieve with the mobile platform too. I see the biggest potential for this being in Europe in the immediate future and although I have the greatest of respect for the people at Macromedia Europe who’re working on this I simply don’t think that the company has allocated the necessary resources to doing the job as thouroughly as it needs to be. Until the player really starts to show up on handsets in Europe there won’t be a market for Flash content, and I know for a fact that Macromedia aren’t seriously talking to certain handset manufacturers like you would imagine they are. Anyway, I’m not a Macromedia insider, there maybe things afoot that I don’t know about (probably are…) and my negative feelings towards the player distro might turn out to be nothing but hot air – I sincerely hope so – because otherwise the huge potential that Flash Lite offers will amount to nothing.
