Originally "flash video" was Sorenson Spark/H.263, in 2005 they added On2's VP6 which was their high quality option until they added H.264 a couple of years later. Each step improved quality but mostly by adding decode complexity so as computers have got faster people have migrated to the heavier-weight codecs.

I would imagine that today all but legacy content served via Flash on the web is a standard H.264 file that can be easily repurposed for serving via HTML5 to Safari and newer iDevices (older ones only supported the lower profiles).

The other thing to remember about Flash though, is that they achieve something like 97% penetration very quickly. There are very few devices sitting out there w/ flash9 or earlier.

See this: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/vers...

Exactly, which raises the question of why Adobe would bother transitioning a market that they completely dominated from one codec to another if they weren't feeling the pressure of H.264 from the mobile space (ZG's assertion appears to be that mobile in general — or, at least, iOS in particular — exerted no such pressure).

I think Adobe rarely gets accused of having their finger on the pulse of the mobile market around the year 2007. Instead H.264 was just an obvious choice, they would probably have gone with it in 2005 if the licensing situation was better, they certainly got abuse from some quarters for not doing so at that time.

My contention was that serving H.264 became feasible the day Flash started supporting it. The day before VP6 was a better choice because everyone had it installed and could therefore actually watch your video. The same is true now of H.264, it may be a wonderful codec and used in Blu-Ray and blah, blah, blah but the reason you can put it on a website and have 98% of people watch it is because it's supported by Flash. Sure Apple can force you to install Quicktime to watch their keynote, Microsoft can do the same with Silverlight, everyone else uses what's already out there on basically every machine, which is, and has been for a while, Flash.

Adobe makes their money on tools, not Flash. If there's going to be a new market, they'll jump on it. They said so many times. Currently they're working on a wysiwyg HTML5 editor, Flash to HTML5 converter, etc.