Custom Flash Players Blog

The Benefits of Flash

The Adobe Flash player is the best way for users to enjoy synchronized multimedia presentations. More than four hundred and eighty one million users choose flash player. This means that Flash video is available on ninety eight percent of desktop computers, compared to sixty four percent for Windows Media player. The Adobe delivers high impact design, animation and web content across all browsers and platforms. The player is distributed by Macromedia which is a subsidiary of Adobe. Simply put Adobe Flash is the environment for authoring the files and Flash Player is the machine that runs the files, but very often the two terms are used synonymously.

Macromedia Flash has been specially designed to address any hiccoughs faced by those with mobility problems to access the controls that allow the user to move more easily between Macromedia Flash and HTML content. Flash Player is a great way of enhancing the use of multilingual text, because it supports Unicode text encoding.

Macromedia Flash provides users with great playback and navigation features. In comparison with other video players the Flash Video start up time is significantly faster. This results in an enhanced experience of synchronized multimedia presentations as it reduces the buffering time.

The Macromedia Flash 7 comes with a variety of functions, which makes it an fertile environment for future development. Small wonder that the Flash is seen as the standards’ industry leader when it comes to the creation of rich media content and further applications. Originally the Flash player was designed to deliver two dimensional animations but further development determined its suitability for creating rich applications and for streaming audio and visual images.

The player makes use of vector graphics to minimize the size of files and creates files that are designed to save both loading time and bandwidth use. Some internet browsers come with the Flash player already incorporated into them and comes as a plugin with other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Flash 9 is the latest version and is available for computers with Windows 98 and above, although Flash 7 is still officially the latest version. Although Flash itself is generally available Adobe has not publicised either its source code or its file format specifications.

The only real alternative to Flash is the free gnash player, although this is not entirely complete due to a built in need for reverse engineering and no basic file format specification. One of the potential drawbacks of using Flash is that it does have the capability of compromising the online security of the user as it is designed to interact with any sites that are visited online and which contain Flash content. Players may not necessarily be aware that their internet privacy faces potential dangers. Internet sites can leave cookies on the user’s hard drive without their knowledge and could thus send sensitive data to a third party. However, these tendencies can be blocked by the user who can access a settings management page on the Adobe website.

How A Custom Flash Player Can Help Your Business

A few years ago major sites like YouTube seen the potential that online video has to offer so the creators decided to give online internet users the ability to share there creations with the rest of the world. As you know Google eventually purchased YouTube for 1.6 Billion dollars after they were only online for one and a half years but giving users an easy way to publish there videos online was not the real power behind there website.

The real power came with there own custom flash players and giving other website owners an easy way to display there videos on there own websites. You see your own custom flash players can have your own logo embedded into it so when another website decides to display your video on there site they are exposing there users to your own brand.

These custom logos can also be made clickable so when a user from another website clicks on your logo they are re-directed back to your website. This enables you to gain massive brand awareness and massive amounts of free website visitors just for allowing other webmasters to display your videos on there websites.

The great thing about online video right now is that the search engines cannot properly index them. Now you may be wondering why this is currently a good thing and the reason its a good thing is because of something called duplicate content penalties.

You see when you write your own unique article online the search engines give you much more credit over people who just steal content from other people online, if this was the case with online video then other webmasters would be a lot less likely to embed your video into there websites because they may end up with lower search engine rankings.

As of 2008 the search engines still have no way of determining if a video is unique or not, the search engines only know that the content is a video but they have no clue what the video contains. This will not always be the case though as search technologies advance we will eventually see them overcome this barrier but that technology is still many years away.

So does this mean that your online video cannot show up in the search engines? Well the answer to this is no, your online videos can still hold weight in the search engines through video sitemaps and tagging, Google and other major search engines index video online by the tags and other content that is on the same page.

So far we know how viral online video can be and how much new visitors and brandability they can generate for our own websites but you may be wondering is that all they can be used for and the answer to this is no.

Over the last year or so online advertising agencies as well as Google have been researching ways to better monetize online video and the great advancements have been made, you see now our own custom flash players can be used for more then just increased brandability and website traffic, they can also be used as a source for online advertising revenue.

This is done by showing the users a relevant advertisement at the end of the video, this functionality has been included with all of our flash players, we give you the ability to show advertisements at the end of every video by simply adding a few more parameters to your embed codes, this option is of course optional because not everyone will want to display advertisements at the end of there videos.

So you see by having your own custom flash players you are able to make your websites much more viral which can easily increase your brand, website visitors, profitability and your search engine rankings.

We hope you enjoyed this article because we will be creating a lot more as our website grows and showing you how you can get in on all the amazing things that a custom flash player can do for your site.