ReadWriteWeb reports that traffic analyst Hitwise is saying that YouTube now has a market share in the video sector of 73.18%.

Traffic analysts Hitwise released new numbers today indicating that while online video sites as a category have seen a 7% drop in traffic year over year since March 2007 - YouTube has seen a remarkable 32% growth in visits during that period. YouTube’s market share in the video sector is now at 73.18%, Hitwise reports.

That means that at least 73.18% of online video traffic is in the Flash video format. SEVENTY-THREE PERCENT!

But it gets better…

The study reports that the top five online video websites, representing 90.43% of video traffic, also use Flash:

1. YouTube - 73.18%
2. MySpaceTV - 9.21%
3. Google Video - 4.06%
4. Yahoo! Video - 2.16%
5. Break.com - 1.82%

…and it keeps getting better…

Among “Independent Online Video Websites” and rounding out the top 10, Flash also powers it all:

1. Break.com - 1.82%
2. MetaCafe - 0.98%
3. Daily Motion - 0.96%
4. Veoh - 0.93%
5. Blinx - 0.58%

ReadWriteWeb also notes:

It is worth noting that ad networks report a seeing a substantial number of viewers on niche video sites - Hitwise here includes only general interest video sites. Thus these numbers cannot be used to conclude that there is no Long Tail in online video in general - that’s a separate question. The point is that among general interest sites, there is effectively no Long Tail.

The numbers presumably do not include viewership of videos embedded on third party websites like blogs, a factor that would undoubtedly only make YouTube’s dominance bigger if it were to be included.

With the addition of h.264, hardware-accelerated fullscreen video, content protection via FMS 3.0, and AAC+ audio in Flash Player 9.3 last December, I can’t imagine why anyone would use any other technology for web video delivery.

More info on this report here.

We’ve just announced that we’re leading an initiative to define an open file format for digital cinema files.

Adobe intends to leverage its successful Digital Negative Specification (DNG) file format as a foundation, and Adobe plans to work with a broad coalition of leading camera manufacturers, including Panavision, Silicon Imaging, Dalsa, Weisscam, and ARRI—along with software vendors, including Iridas and The Foundry, and codec provider CineForm—to define the requirements for an open, publicly documented file format that it plans to call CinemaDNG.

We’ve also announced an initiative to built more meta data into the digital video and audio production workflow.

c|net reports: Separately, Adobe will give a preview at NAB 2008 of technology that automatically transcribes the audio track of a video file.

For editors, this will allow them to more quickly find passages within a clip based on a text read-out of the audio. The output of the video-editing software will also include that transcribed information.

As a result, viewers of a Web video will be able to search on terms to find a specific location within a video.

For example, a person could search a CNET video review for a product name and a specific feature, such as camera zoom.

Adobe will demonstrate the feature on a version of its Soundbooth audio-editing product under development and on Premiere Pro.

The company intends to support the feature in the next major release of its video work-flow software. There was a two-year gap between the releases of Creative Suite 3 and 2, so the next major version is likely to come some time in 2009.

The transcription information will be stored in XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform), another format developed by Adobe.

Good news for digital video and audio producers out there!

One of my favorite industry blogs, ReadWriteWeb, has a good analysis of the recent acquisition of the popular AIR-based Twitter desktop client, twhirl. If you’re not familiar, twhirl is regarded as the most popular Twitter client available today - with a rapidly-growing user base.

Michael Arrington’s Techcrunch first broke the news:

San Francisco video/chat startup Seesmic has acquired Twhirl, a popular application created by German developer Marco Kaiser that allows users to access the Twitter service directly from their desktop, and also cross post to other services like Pownce and Jaiku. The acquisition price is not being disclosed.

Twhirl is considered among the better third party Twitter applications. ReadWriteWeb, for example, just yesterday identified it as the third most used method for posting to the Twittersphere, behind the web and instant messaging, and just in front of Twitterific. It has been downloaded 100,000 or so times.

In the ReadWriteWeb analysis, Marshall Kirkpatrick mentions the “best thing about Twhirl” (by the way, I’m going to recommend that our marketing team use Marshall’s description, “the AIR/Flex/Flash ecosystem is made for hotness”:

AIR - Cross Platform RIA
The best thing about Twhirl is that it’s built in Adobe AIR. While Microsoft’s Silverlight is coming on hard and fast, the AIR/Flex/Flash ecosystem is made for hotness and has the most momentum in the grassroots developer community.

AIR lets developers write in HTML, Javascript and Flash - but run it on the desktop - of a Windows, Mac or Linux computer. These are Rich Internet Applications - apps that sit on the desktop and function outside the browser, but that are tied to the web and leverage connectivity as well. Check out Redmonk’s RIA Weekly Podcast if you want to get excited about RIAs on a regular basis.

Congratulations to Marco and the Seesmic team. This deal has a lot of promise. I’m very excited to see AIR-based applications become the subject of compelling Web 2.0 acquisitions.

Get twhirl >>

I try to avoid posting anything that has to do with politics, but doing so tends to get more and more difficult every day. I just stumbled upon a new online series by PBS [via uncrate.com] as part of their “FRONTLINE” series - FRONTLINE: Bush’s War. The two-part series is delivered as a Flash-based video experience. If you’re interested in PBS’ take on the current US President’s leadership check out this compelling series.

Grant Skinner has released a new tool called RegExr aimed to help ActionScript developers edit and test Regular Expressions in ActionScript 3.0.

[gskinner.com] RegExr is an online tool for editing and testing Regular Expressions (RegExp / RegEx). It provides a simple interface to enter RegEx expressions, and visualize matches in real-time editable source text. It also provides a handy RegExp snippet sidebar with descriptions and usage examples to make it easier to learn Regular Expressions through trial and error.

Learn more about using Regular Expressions in ActionScript 3.0 and Flex >>

Give RegExr a try >>

As you’ve no doubt heard (and heard, and heard, and heard, and heard…), there is some new news about the ever-so-popular subject of Flash support on Apple’s iPhone. However, the reports of Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan’s comments about Flash support on the iPhone during yesterday’s earnings call were not necessarily complete and accurate (shocking!!!).

Here’s what Shantanu said (as can be confirmed by viewing the recording of the call here):

“Well, you know, we really believe that Flash is synonymous with the Internet and frankly anybody who wants to browse the Web and experience the Web in all its glory really needs Flash support. I mean, we were very excited about the announcement from Windows mobile adoption of Flash on their devices and the fact that we’ve shipped a half billion devices now, non-PC devices — so we’re also committed to bringing the Flash experience to the iPhone and we’ll work with Apple. We’ve evaluated the SDK we can now start to develop the Flash Player ourselves. And,we think it benefits our joint customers so we want to work with Apple to bring that capability to the device.”

And here is Adobe’s follow-up, official statement:

“Adobe has evaluated the iPhone SDK and can now start to develop a way to bring Flash Player to the iPhone. However, to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone web-browsing experience we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it. We think Flash availability on the iPhone benefits Apple and Adobe’s millions of joint customers, so we want to work with Apple to bring these capabilities to the device.”

I hope that helps clear things up.

UPDATE: Adobe’s Bill Perry has a more detailed post about this issue

UPDATE 2: I forgot to mention that Microsoft recently announced that they are licensing Flash Lite and Adobe Reader LE for the Windows Mobile OS so all future Windows Mobile devices will automatically be Flash and PDF-enabled.

Even though leg 1 of on AIR Europe is sold out, we still have a bunch of other cities open to registration. Also, the capacity of the Paris event has been expanded due to overwhelming demand.

If you want a deep dive on Adobe AIR and can make it to one of the cities below, make sure you sign up now while there’s still room.

• Paris, 02-Apr-08
• Stockholm, 02-Jun-08
• Berlin, 04-Jun-08
• Warsaw, 06-Jun-08
• Prague, 09-Jun-08
• Munich, 11-Jun-08
• Milano, 13-Jun-08

To learn all about the on AIR Europe tour, visit onair.adobe.com.

Flex.org has a “Showcase” section that lists a variety of public-facing Flex apps. This is a very handy resource.

This download is very hard to find and doesn’t seem to be in the Flex 3 SDK - so here’s the direct link:http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=flex%5Fskins 

We’ve been having a discussion internally about our program for Flex training in higher education. As I posted earlier, we recently started providing Flex Builder to students and faculty for free. What else can we do to get more students around the world learning Flex? Please share your thoughts and suggestions.