Flash Player a Declining Asset

My company makes 7 figures in revenue selling and hosting Flash-based websites (portfolios for photographers).<p>Our attrition rate is not that high but when people leave, it's now <i>always</i> to go to an html site (usually WordPress-based). Before it was usually to a Flash-based competitor.<p>Our HTML5 service is in beta and appears to be promising (for us).

Flash is transitioning from a platform for websites to a platform for high-performance code, such as gaming, graphical simulations, etc... Whatever strides WebGL might be making at the moment it's a long way from the kind of things Flash 11 is capable of. If Adobe can keep the barrier to entry lower on Flash than WebGL then they ought to have a viable product.<p>Unfortunately for many Flash developers the bread-and-butter site stuff is going away; if you're not skilled enough to transition into gaming and other such computationally intensive work then best to familiarise yourself with the HTML5 suite, and quickly.

Sounds reasonable. Flash as a player seems on the way out in a lot of ways. Flash as a content creation tool could have a much longer lifespan if Adobe plays it right. The tools are quite powerful and the number of artists that can use it and use it well is large. As mentioned quite a few games use flash to create assets but have their own custom export and playback. Castle Crashers and Shank spring to mind but there are quite a few others.<p>Unreal Engine 3 announced support for exporting to flash. Given that they also support Scaleform it would be possible to write a mini-game in flash running inside UE3 running in a flash player. And if you throw Unity into the mix...

The big problem with Flash is that we're going to have a billion mobile Internet devices in a few years and none of them will display Flash in a mobile browser. iOS and Android alone should hit a billion devices. The iPad and Kindle are probably going to be two of the hottest gifts during the holiday season.

Flash may be a declining asset, but it seems like nearly every web page I visit still uses flash. It has a ways to decline before developers can just ignore it.

Or how to remove a subtle "?" to get your point across.

The video is the asset.<p>Many ways to serve it. Many ways to retrieve it. And many ways to convert and play it.<p>The skills to do those things are perhaps assets.<p>But the software is all open source and free.

Flashing is declinning, but there is no vector animation engine for the Web yet.<p>SVG? A bunch of xml is not exactly what vector graphics animation needed.