Multimedia Trends

Whether or not it is indicative of a larger marketwide trend, we are definitely noticing a pattern in terms of what we are producing in the office.

Although not common, we used to be asked to produce entire sites in flash. This no longer happens (or at least, it no longer happens for externally facing ones – there are exceptions for intranets and applications, but more on the latter in a bit). Instead, it is becoming the domain of the microsite. In fact, we have been working on a couple of these microsites recently (one of which recently went live for Hi-Tec, complete with wooshy effects and sounds!). This is great for having a bit of life on your site, without the risks to rankings etc that are normally associated with flash only sites.

Another thing I have noticed a steady increase in is 3d. I have mentioned this before, and not as an attempt to encourage everyone to start requesting 3d online flash apps, but rather to point to a definite upwards trend. This has in part been sparked by the papervision library for flash, but in a broader sense seems to have been sparked by general demand. This is indicated by Adobe's announcement of support for simple 3d in the next version of flash.

On the subject of Adobe and announcements, they have recently made announcements (http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/05/01/adobe_open_access_protocols/) that should help in the development of multimedia apps for mobile phones. As the article mentions, there are also technologies such as JavaFX and Microsoft's Silverlight with an eye to mobile content. While most people don’t tend to associate the mobile with multimedia content, phones are becoming ever more capable of displaying it; any help in the propagation of multimedia content across the mobile format is welcome in my opinion. Another help would be cheaper mobile data bills, buts that’s another blog entirely!

Also covered in the above announcement is Air; and so we find ourselves back at what I touched on before - applications (It’s like I planned this or something!). Basically, Air can be considered as a flash player for the desktop (as opposed to a browser). This allows people to write applications using technology they are comfortable with for what is effectively a different target platform. Potentially it means that you can provide consumers with a desktop, offline hook-up to an online service. Now, this isn’t quite what I had touched on before – Air wasn’t ready when we were required to start the project in question. In our case, we are writing a C# application that acts a wrapper to a Flash / Flex application (by communicating with a database). However, the announcement does touch on the opening up of the player to better allow this kind of development.

This isn’t to say there is not more traditional multimedia being built – people still request video players / audio players. It does however suggest that the focus is always changing and evolving as people try to find the best way to deliver their message to the public.

Ps. – request more 3d…

Nick