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.

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.

Last September we previewed Flash Media Server 3, which will be shipping later this month. In December we made the official announcement but, based on questions I’ve been getting recently, I think a lot of people missed the details due to the holiday break. I thought I would summarize some of the more interesting details.

1. New product editions: “Interactive” and “Streaming” (full comparison of editions here)

Flash Media Interactive Server 3 - Full ver licensing starts at US$4,500

This is the full-blown FMS version that gives you all the bells and whistles. Notable new features:

1. Major performance gains over earlier editions, which mean more streams and users per server.
2. More secure content delivery via the new RTMPE protocol, offering high-performance 128-bit encryption. This also includes a verification feature for protecting SWF files from being reused, modified, or hosted in unauthorized locations.
3. H.264 video and HE-AAC audio for streaming video up to 1080p HD resolution
4. Improved Live video support via Flash Media Encoder 2
5. Mobile delivery to Flash Lite 3
6. New plug-in architecture that allows you to integrate with other back-end servers and services.

Features of Flash Media Interactive Server 3 that are NOT included with the lower-priced Flash Media Streaming Server edition:

• Multi-way applications (think Adobe Acrobat Connect)
• Unlimited scalability with Origin/Edge (replicate content from an origin server to an edge server)
• Plug-in architecture for LDAP authentication
• C++ Plug-in architecture
• Multipoint publishing (for live stream posting to multiple origins to automatically reflect the stream)
• Server redirection (used for authentication, requests can be redirected based on business logic)
• AMF3 support (for data communications)
• Server-side playlists
• Video recording

Download the free Developer Edition (Currently FMS 2, will update to FMS 3 when it ships later this month)

Flash Media Streaming Server 3 - Full ver licensing starts at US$995

This is a more affordable step up from progressive download. It allows you to gain the benefits of streaming such as improved performance, especially over slower connections, and the ability to seek forward into video content that hasn’t been downloaded to the user yet. It also allows unlimited bandwidth and users. This is a huge benefit compared to the old licensing model.

Adobe and the BBC today announced a strategic relationship around the delivery of Web video. By adopting Adobe Flash Player software, the BBC will make its free catch-up TV service — BBC iPlayer —available as a streaming service across Macintosh and Linux, as well as Windows, by the end of the year. The strategic relationship will also allow the BBC to provide a single consistent user experience for the majority of streamed video and audio content on www.bbc.co.uk.

I’m very excited about this announcement as it validates the importance of delivering cross platform content to all of your users and creating an “it just works” experience. It’s also great to see the BBC talk about how Adobe’s client technologies are only part of the solution. The BBC, the world’s largest creator of original media content, also uses the full Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium suite for their video production.

Mashable.com says:

…What’s most interesting about this whole deal is the BBC’s slight departure from Microsoft dominance when it comes to the implementation of the iPlayer. This is great for consumers, but we’re all wondering if this will have any affect on the relationship between the BBC and Adobe’s rival, who was recently noted as wanting to work out a deal with the BBC for content distribution across the Xbox network.

last100.com says:

…Whilst it’s tempting to interpret the BBC’s decision to partner with Adobe as a political one, since it both solves the Mac and Linux issue and answers critics who accused the public broadcaster of being too close to Redmond (Huggers himself used to be the former director of Microsoft’s Windows digital media division), there are a number of other compelling reasons for choosing Flash.

The Flash browser-based player has established itself as the industry standard for streaming video, after its adoption by sites such as YouTube, propelled by a large existing user base — Adobe claims claims the Flash player is installed on 99.3% of Internet-connected desktops. In contrast, Silverlight isn’t yet a proven technology and, having only just launched, doesn’t have nearly the number of users that Adobe boasts.

Ryan Stewart (who works on my team at Adobe) says:

…Just like a lot of big media sites out there, most of their video is in WMV format. That’s something that Adobe has had trouble breaking in to. Despite the benefits and ubiquity of Flash, it’s expensive to convert a massive library of WMV content to Flash content. But because Flash is so popular and now will support the H.264 codec, people are starting to make that move despite the cost.

Read/Write Web says:

…The choice of Adobe’s Flash technology makes sense. According to Adobe, Flash is deployed on over 99% of Internet-connected computers and the latest version of the Flash player supports the H.264 codec. Further, the 1.0 release of AIR should also incorporate Flash’s HD video capabilities, so should the BBC wish to bring Flash video to the offline version of their iPlayer, Adobe’s runtime will support 1080p. I was told that the BBC will be evaluating the possibility of using Adobe’s Media Player in the future.

Check out the full press release here.

This Papervision3D stuff is just too cool. After reading my post from last week, Lee Brimelow of Frog Design decided to build a version of the North Face Kiosk Demo (originally done in WPF) in Flash Player 9 using Papervision3D. Very cool - and works on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows Server 2003, Mac OS X (10.1 and up, PowerPC and Intel), and Linux.

Nice work, Lee!

Wow. I’ve seen a lot of amazing things done with Flash. And as of late, I’ve seen some REALLY amazing things done with Papervision 3D. But this one resulted in me grabbing all of the co-workers that sit around me to all crowd around my monitor and stare.

During the development of The North Face Kiosk I never thought what they were doing with WPF would have ever been possible, with acceptable performance, with Flash anytime in the near future. I was wrong, take a look…

http://www.actionscriptarchitect.com/2007/02/28/flash-video-on-3d/

[via Ben Stucki and Chafic Kazoun]

I don’t know how I missed this. Sorenson released a Java-based application, Sorenson Squish 1.0, that companies can embed in their web content to allow end-users to encode their videos on their local machine before uploading a Flash-based FLV file to their site.

Sorenson Squish(R) embeds the power of Sorenson’s award-winning Squeeze(R) Compression Suite into any Web page on your site, allowing you to easily accept user-submitted video. Encoding is done on the local machine, so you can add this functionality to your site without any additional infrastructure costs. Users can drag-and-drop video files onto the Squish applet or capture video streams from Webcams or camcorders, and have them be automatically encoded and uploaded to any network-accessible host. Sorenson Squish offers the industry’s highest-quality compression, combined with unparalleled ease-of-use.

I am a HUGE fan of Ze Frank’s daily, “The Show.” If you’ve never seen one of his episodes, I highly recommend it. In my opinion, this guy is a genius and I won’t be surprised if he becomes the next John Stewart.

Many long-time Flash designers know that before his famous podcast, Ze was a well known Flash designer (check out some of his links on his home page). He also gave a hilarious opening performance in the keynote at the Macromedia MAX 2005 conference in Burbank Anaheim, CA.

Check out the show and you’ll see that, next to Quicktime, Ze now offers a Flash video version courtesy of video sharing site Revver.

OK, so I love it when I see Microsoft using Flash to build really cool stuff, but I don’t really get this one. Msdewey.com features an attractive young lady saying random things. When you type a question into the page’s search box, she says some other random thing. After many attempts, I wasn’t able to get her to say anything that had anything to do with the question that I asked so I’m not sure exactly what value she is supposed to add to the site (aside from looking very nice). I was thinking that this site might be mimicking the popular subservient chicken site (or the other variations that came before it) but subservient chicken actually does things that correspond to what you’re typing.

Am I missing something?

YouTube has released a new service called QuickCapture which lets users record their own videos using the webcams. The application is build using Flash Media Server, which lets you record live video streams encoded in the Flash Player using the Sorenson h.263 encoder built into the Flash Player. The video streams are captured by Flash Media Server and saved to disk on the server as an FLV file.

[via arstechnica]