The future of Flash/Silverlight technologies.

[Devil's Rule]

I'm not sure if there is an existing discussion on this topic, I searched but could not find one.

In the last year or two there's been quite a bit of talk that technologies such as Flash and Silverlight will be squeezed out of the market with the emergence of HTML5 and other such technologies. I myself am not to sure about that. While the use of Flash and Silverlight technologies for simple sites, is quite pointless IMHO, they do have their purposes.

Here is one example of a really cool little app built in Silverlight. "3D visualization of real-time player tracking data captured by stereoscopic cameras at an international football match. Each XYZ coordinate is interpolated and animated in Silverlight 4 using a retained mode 3D engine".

How cool is this? Let me know your thoughts.

Cheers!

[Hack&Lube]

What kind of encryption and DRM is built into or can be built into HTML5? One reason why something like Silverlight has strengths is in that area. That's why Netflix uses Silverlight. They couldn't use other technologies at the time because their liscencees wanted a very strong protection scheme.

[Shazam]

Flash will be dead soon. And not a moment too soon.

SL will always exist because MS.

[Bill Bumface]

SL was wicked for streaming the Olympics last year.

[kermitology]

Flash's DRM implementation is contributing to it's downfall.

[sclitheroe]

I think browser plugins are a dying breed. Not so much because of what you can do with HTML5, but also because we are so strongly moving towards an app based future. You can do a lot more with a native app consuming, processing, and displaying the HTML and XML from the server than you can with the browser.

People like apps. Developers have proven that its not completely painful to support a number of platforms. Most importantly, many sites and content producers can monetize the app in a way they've never been able to via a straight web browser experience. 0.99 -> 1.99 an app isn't much, until you're selling hundreds of thousands of copies or more, and suddenly its quite a lucrative approach to delivering your content.

Ask Rovio if they made the right choice by writing their flagship app native or using a plugin like Silverlight or Flash and targetting the browser.