Patty Winter had written:
|
| In article ,
| art clemons wrote:
| Dave Boland wrote:
|
| Anyone KNOW why radio stations insist on using flash for audio instead
| of normal audio formats like Windows, MP3, etc? I see no advantage
| since it won't work on Apple products and HTML 5 has audio built in.
| Just makes the listener's job more difficult. Makes no sense.
|
| The most likely reason flash is used for streaming is that it is OS and
| browser independent.
|
| So is MP3. Flash is overkill for audio streaming.

Any codec is OS and browser-independent if there is a version of it
available for the desired platform. For some Linux distros (e.g.
Fedora), one has to go to additional effort to get mp3 support.

That said, the radio-station streaming practice that I abhor is the insistence
on special clients, often functional only on Windows systems, that are
there to try to push garish advertising at you. They are bloated and
pointless.

An excellent use of Flash is the online player for France-Info (the
national all-news network in France, www.france-info.com). It lets
you know the name of the current segment, along with the names of
those immediately preceding (so that you can go back and listen to
them) and those that are coming up. So if a station uses Flash for
something more than just being a player and pushing ads, then I
think it could be a good thing.


--
Mark Roberts - E-Mail address is valid but I don't use Google Groups
If you quote, please quote only relevant passages and not the whole article.