Adobe Adopts HTTP Live Streaming For iOS 97
unassimilatible writes "Ars Technica reports that Adobe has capitulated in the iOS-Flash war, and has adopted HTTP live streaming for iOS. HTTP Live Streaming is a protocol that Apple developed to stream live and recorded video using standard HTTP connections instead of the more difficult to optimize RTSP. It uses H.264-encoded video and AAC or MP3 audio packaged into discrete chunks of an MPEG-2 transport stream, along with a .m3u playlist to catalog the files that make up the individual chunks of the stream. QuickTime on both Mac OS X and iOS can play back this format, and it is the only streaming format compatible with the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch."
Re:IOS (Score:5, Informative)
Apple actually licenses the trademark iOS from Cisco. There's no evil theft going on.
Re:More difficult to optimize? (Score:4, Informative)
My understanding is that this is purely about ease of use of getting through firewalls, NATs and PATs. Everything passes HTTP, and there is no other transport protocol (not even UDP over port 80) for which that is true.