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Fact-Checking “Thoughts on Flash”

Jim
By JimFollow on Twitter

Yesterday the Web was a-gog over the six-point uppercut Steve Jobs laid on Adobe in his blog post, “Thoughts on Flash“.

While Jobs had valid points on some issues, on others he was in sales mode, like when explaining that Apple users are in no way deprived of the Web’s full catalog of video due to Apple’s lack of Flash support on its mobile devices.

The quote:

“Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.”

Well, it turns out that depends on what the meaning of “much” is. I asked the Clicker content team to fact-check this last bit on a source-by-source basis, and here is what they came back with:

Vimeo - Fully compatible on both iPad and iPhone. No app required. Check. (We’ll assume iPhone and iPod are one and the same.)

Netflix - Netflix app required, website automatically detects if you’ve installed the app and opens to your selected video. Check.

Facebook – All videos on Facebook are natively encoded in h.264, so they stream on the iPad…but not on the iPhone for some reason.

ABC - iPad app required. ABC.com website only plays clips, no full episodes on iPad. Won’t detect if you’ve installed app and open to your selected video like Netflix.

CBS - Only one episode of one show available for the iPad at CBS.com. And it’s Survivor. No App. No iPhone.

CNN - Fully iPad compatible. No iPhone.

MSNBC - Fully iPad compatible. No iPhone.

Fox News – Fully iPad and iPhone compatible. Check.

ESPN – Recent videos iPad compatible, but not everything. Shows like Outside the Lines work, but if I visit the 30for30 page, none of the video works. So hit or miss. No iPhone.

NPR – Only select homepage videos seem to work. Looking deep into their site or NPR-related sites, can’t get anything to work. No iPhone.

Time
– iPad: New videos work, not old ones (or pre-iPad ones). No iPhone.

The New York Times - iPad: Homepage videos work, but NOTHING else. Not even Pogue’s show. And nothing works on the iPhone.

The Wall Street Journall – Fully iPad & iPhone compatible. Check.

Sports Illustrated – Recent Sports videos work on iPad but old videos and Swimsuit Edition videos don’t. No iPhone.

People - iPad compatible. Mostly clips though. Also works on the iPhone. Check.

National Geographic - iPad compatible. Mostly clips. Can’t get full site to load on iPhone.

Of course, for many of these sources, like CBS, you can purchase downloadable versions of their shows on iTunes, and transfer them to your iPad or iPhone. (The cynics among you may believe that’s the real goal for Apple here.)

But for the vast majority of streamable online programming, it’s still a Flash world, at least for the time being. If you want to watch them on a mobile Apple product, you’ll be waiting a while.