Yeah, but there was a reason that we "didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet" at the time — bitmapped videos were far too bandwidth-intensive for most people to download in realtime. (You could do it in theory, but a 3-minute, 240p clip MPEG1/RealPlayer movie was something you'd need to dedicate a half-hour to fetching, either using a download manager or Limewire.)

This was also the reason that YouTube didn't get started until 2005 — that was about when at least some people were starting to be "ready" to receive streaming bitmapped video over their Internet connections, without needing to make a big production of it.

Flash as a distribution format for videos was distinctive and successful because it was essentially a standardized abstract machine for demoscene demos — it wasn't a video, it was a program that rendered a video. So a flash animation could be arbitrarily small, as long as the author was arbitrarily clever about composing things out of vector bits and small reusable textures.

I think you nailed it on the head with the demoscene mention. not only was this one of the only ways to get this kind of content in those days, but any ol hobbyist could and did pick it up. netflix is the farthest you can get from ever seeing anything like homestar runner's characters, plot, etc

Hanna Barbera is another famous aethetic driven from logistical considerations.

Every HB character wears a tie or a necklace because it provides a seam to separate the head from the body. You can have a bunch of Wilma or Yogi heads that reuse a single body. Lets you animate dialog without having to redraw literally everything.

Related: drawing mouths on the side of the face to save on the animation budget: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CheekyMouth

> Flash as a distribution format for video was obsolete basically as soon as people's Internet connections improved enough that they could just stream the pre-rendered output of someone else rendering out the Flash animation program instead. (Which was around... 2010, I'd say?) Which also meant that, at that same moment, the "Flash aesthetic" of vectors and reusable resources basically instantaneously ceased to exist, because it had all been in the name of conserving bandwidth, and there was no longer a reason to do that if you were rendering the result out to MPEG anyway.

You still needed Flash as a player platform for many years afterward. IIRC, Apple were the ones to finally push people to use native HTML elements for that.

I was remembering the same thing. What an awkward few years. I feel like Flash spent its retirement in the most ridiculous way, mainly in rendering players that streamed those crappy FLVs, because people were still insisting on using MSIE in enough numbers that we couldn’t afford to use HTML5 video without at minimum falling back to Flash. Oh, that, and that little SWF everybody needed to use in order to implement a click-to-copy button, back when there wasn’t an API in browsers for that function.

Yes, sorry, I should have said "Flash as a distribution format for Flash animations" there.

> Flash as a distribution format for video was distinctive and successful because it was essentially a standardized abstract machine for demoscene demos

While it WAS true, it's not COMPLETELY true. The first versions of Flash had very little scripting support, it was basically limited to switching between scenes. The first Flash that could do something non-trivial was Flash 5, released some time in 2000 and by that time Flash domination had already been established.

The secret was in its authoring tools and the concept of timelines. Basically, you inserted "key frames" and Flash interpolated between them automatically. So if you need to draw a triangle moving from point A to point B, you just add it to the timeline at the starting position, then move down the timeline, insert a key frame and drag the triangle to point B.

And these timelines can be composed, looped, triggered by scripts, etc.

Here's an example video that shows that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOPCPZO5YOA

And that's it. No need to write any fancy code. Flash would do everything for you, and it's baked right into the file format, that was specifically designed to be compact and concise.

I'm surprised I haven't seen a similar SVG editor for kids. All the kids I know who are into animating are using pirate Adobe software.

The best I know of is

https://www.wickeditor.com/

It is free, open source and surprisingly good(for simple things), but developement is on hold or abandoned. (I looked at the source and it is not great, but not horrible either, but with the original creators not around anymore and lack of documentation, would be a pain to overtake)

Tweening and animation programs are hard to find for young people.

I remember one I saw running in a video on an Atari ST that pretty much outdid anything I've ever seen since, indie developer too. Wish I could remember the name, maybe he made another version.

To be clear, I didn't (exactly) mean that the author of a Flash animation has to think in terms of creating a "demoscene demo." I rather meant that the Flash abstract machine is designed to primarily do the types of thing that demoscene demos do — i.e. to use vectors and gradient fills and clipping masks to achieve procedural visual effects. You could say that the SWF abstract machine has a "demoscene-alike Instruction Set Architecture." Most of the work of figuring out how to achieve particular visual effects on that abstract machine, though, is domain-knowledge built into the "Flash compiler" of the authoring tool.

In my previous post, I emphasized Flash as a distribution format for a reason. While the authoring tools (and the .FLA project format) do work with clean abstractions of a timeline with keyframes and tweens (and objects with their own swappable animations that have their own sub-timelines), the .SWF export format bakes all that down into an imperative program for an abstract machine whose primitive opcodes involve defining and moving around (potentially texture-filled) vector objects on a canvas. Writing SWF bytecode directly, would be similar to programming against a retained-mode fixed-function graphics API like OpenGL — just without any 3D support. In other words, it would be like writing a demoscene demo.

Or, to put that another way: the .SWF export format is basically a cousin of PostScript, but with a finishRenderAndWaitForNextFrame command, and the ability to set spline points' velocities. Which is very much unlike declarative vector formats like SVG. The closest comparison, I think, might be to the object-oriented vector display-lists used in vector-based arcade machines (see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smStEPSRKBs.)

But, in both the arcade games I mentioned, and in Flash, if you've achieved the effect you want and are now optimizing the final work for size and performance, doing so will mostly be a matter of modularity and reuse of small repeatable design elements. Having "mechanical sympathy" for what the Flash export format looks like, will push you toward certain authoring decisions, e.g. building complex scenes using many smaller primitive objects that each independently animate (or in later versions of Flash, are independent state-machines); creating objects that can be uniform and so constructed by cloning rather than redefinition (leading to a surprising number of 2D flash animations and later games that were built out of colored, untextured voxel boxes); etc.

> While the authoring tools (and the .FLA project format) do work with clean abstractions of a timeline with keyframes and tweens (and objects with their own swappable animations that have their own sub-timelines), the .SWF export format bakes all that down into an imperative program for an abstract machine whose primitive opcodes involve defining and moving around

I mean, you can describe SWF like that, but it's not really what people think now when you say that it's an abstract machine. The SWF file is indeed a series of commands like: "put this object in this layer, and assign this matrix to it".

However, SWF still preserves the notion of persistent vector objects (called "characters") down to the display level. You're not just preparing a command list and then submitting it to a GPU for rendering (like with OpenGL), and then re-doing it again for the next frame.

Characters in SWF are persistent. Flash does all the composing, clipping, and it even does automatic interpolation for you for morphing.

SWF format is now open: https://open-flash.github.io/mirrors/swf-spec-19.pdf - the page 35 contains the description of the most important instruction "PlaceObject" that was used to actually do the animations.

I don't think this is right. RTMP was the protocol for sending videos over the wire and was developed by Macromedia. We didn't have any good replacements for some time.

As much as people might not like to hear it, I believe Flash Videos were how Youtube initially started.

Very little could handle buffering videos that well, or at scale.

Since people kept computers longer, and I was involved in online education/training delivery online in those years, flash video provided more backwards compatibility in a decade where IE4 wouldn't die, then IE6 wouldn't die.

Flash Media Server too, did some pretty interesting things. There were open source options like Red5 that were worth trying out.

Flash made it easy for any kid or creative to do amazing things.

Homestar, Weebl, Salad Fingers, Charlie the Unicorn, Ultimate Showdown, Xiao Xiao, Albino Black Sheep, Newgrounds, YTMND...

It was businesses with splash intros (the kind that Zombo.com parodied) made Flash suck.

"It was businesses with splash intros (the kind that Zombo.com parodied) that made Flash suck."

Just because you can make everything fly around doesn't mean you should.