> 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.
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.