This week has had a lot of ups and downs for Adobe the makers of Flash as well as other essential programs for designers such as Photoshop and After Effects.

To start with the good news, Adobe released Creative Suite 5 or CS5. This is by far one of the biggest updates I have seen in 10 years of video postproduction. For me the nicest update is After Effects becoming completely 64-Bit. No more 8 or 16-bit effects that have been around for 10 years, what an amazing transformation! It is like putting a Mustang engine in a Ford Fiesta = Lightning Fast.

The bad news is Apple stated they will not support Flash on their mobile devices, ever. Then Microsoft said it would not ship IE9 with Flash. Each is gearing their new products to HTML5 for video playback, which is good and bad. The good is with HTML5 content distributors can easily embed video into their webpage with simple HTML tags. The bad news is not all browsers use HTML5 like IE6 and IE7.

In the long run HTML5 video embedding will be a big deal, right now Flash is on 99%+ off all computers. The safest thing to do (if you get Lots of traffic from iPhones and iPads) is make a mobile site devoid of Flash interaction.

"We're excited to say that support for watching 1080p HD videos in full resolution is on its way. Starting next week, YouTube's HD mode will add support for viewing videos in 720p or 1080p, depending on the resolution of the original source, up from our maximum output of 720p today."
Read YouTube's official blog post.

This is awesome news for people shooting 1080p. They will no longer have to convert to 720p and any advancement forwarding web video is great news. It is funny to think about how just a few years ago online video was mostly AVI or WMV files that looked horrible, with small frame sizes, and a gigantic file size. We have come a long way!

On the flip side- I have a cable connection that steadily has 14MBs down and 4MB up running to a dual quad core Apple Pro with a great video card and I still get stuttering video from YouTube in HD. So will it really matter if the picture is bigger is their bandwidth is lagging? Yeah, I'll take it!

Here are some interesting facts and figures from Comscore.

All totaled in August people watched 25 billion videos, 10 billion coming from Google.

Other August 2009 stats:

* 81.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
* The average online video viewer watched 582 minutes of video, or 9.7 hours.
* 120.5 million viewers watched nearly 10 billion videos on YouTube.com.
* 44.9 million viewers watched 340 million videos on MySpace.com.
* The average Hulu viewer watched 12.7 videos.
* The duration of the average online video was 3.7 minutes.

I think this online video thing is catching on! ;)