Flash player gives Adobe a lot of power and keeps their not so good dev/design tooos safe from competition. From what I've seen the current strategy is to try to add features not available in HTML5, like P2P. That would allow youtube and company to roll out torrent-based players and save hugely on bandwidth.
Why couldn't you implement P2P in JavaScript? You'd have to work around browser sandboxing that prevents access to the disk, but you can do that by installing as an extension. I think a JS-based torrent client is reasonable.
"New features" is not a good answer; it might stave things off a bit longer, but the real problem in Flash is that Adobe is choking it to death and only really provides first-class support on Windows.
Only recently have they started taking even the Mac platform seriously, probably trying to prove to Apple that they should be included in the iOS devices. Support is still a complete mess on Linux (the basis of Android and countless other platforms and most new platforms, meaning that any day now a Linux-based platform could be the new hotness, supplanting the iPhone, and then we'll have to go through this whole song and dance again with Adobe pretending to take Linux seriously to try and trick people into letting Flash run on that platform with its 40% penetration), and their penguin.swf blog has nothing but excuses; sure, video on Linux may be less straightforward than video on Windows (because there is actual competition and you have to make a choice instead of taking whatever Microsoft decrees), but lots of people with far fewer resources have been able to deal with it, there's no reason Adobe can't.
That's the thing. Jobs says Flash has had its day because a few years ago Apple was the underdog that wasn't worth supporting. When Apple tried to work with Adobe, they were neglected and left to rot for "higher profile" projects. And now that Jobs and Apple have some real power, 10.1 magically gets filled with Mac-related fixes that should have been in at least half a decade earlier. And Jobs isn't buying it; in his mind, Adobe (correctly) is still the flippant and unresponsive bully who doesn't care about you until your market cap exceeds Microsoft's.
Nobody sane is going to hitch their star to Flash while Adobe lords over it. I understand, as do most of Adobe's recent customers, that Adobe is run by staunch old men who just don't get it, but someone really needs to help them get it, for the good of the web and the good of their company.
I doubt P2P could be used reliably for video streaming. There's a quality of service component of video streaming that P2P solutions can't currently provide effectively in the context of embedded web video streaming. Besides, YouTube probably doesn't cost very much bandwidth-wise. Google has dozens of datacenters placed at or near key peering locations where they can negotiate very low or zero tariff interconnects with major IP networks. At work on a Time-Warner fiber connection, I am 2 hops from Google's network.
Agreed. The main reason why it wouldn't work is that existing broadband deployments are not designed for P2P. Your neighborhood might have a gigabit of downstream bandwidth on fiber from the cable company but the upstream is limited to something like 100 megabits for the entire neighborhood. It sounds nice in theory to cut bandwidth costs, but somehow I don't think the cable companies are going to be too happy with you sharing their limited upstream with your traffic. They'd much rather deliver lots of streaming content downstream, which is what their network is designed for in the first place.
I hope that P2P finds more mainstream uses so that customers start demanding better upload speeds and Comcast et al are forced to oblige. The upload speeds are really a bummer in the US.
Octoshape has had some successful deployments recently, although I suspect they only offload some of the bandwidth from the CDN. Also, Google isn't the only game in town; P2P offers the promise that you could cheaply deliver video to large audiences without having to pay Akamai or give up control to Google.
