Adobe Adopts HTTP Live Streaming For iOS

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:More difficult to optimize?

[gig]

One issue is some networks block RTSP, but not HTTP.

Re:More difficult to optimize?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The patent system works in mysterious ways, so there certainly could be a giant clusterfuck of submarine patents lurking out there; but the RFC was released in '98, and the list of vendors and OSS projects with source, sink, or both support is not a short one(and includes Apple's own proprietary OSX server media streaming package). Whatever video/audio codecs you are streaming on top of RTMP are almost certainly going to land you in a giant heap of trouble; but I would expect RTMP itself to either be harmless or driven into some sort of cross-licensing stalemate by now. Individual vendor extensions, of course, particularly DRM related ones, for which the DMCA can come to the field, are presumably a mess; but Apple's ability to say "The RTMP that is real RTMP is the RTMP that iOS recognizes as such, suck it down." would seem to be equal to its ability to say "HTTP live streaming is the new flavor of the month. RTMP is dead."

I'm certainly not up on the details of live media streaming; but I've never seen a clear breakdown of why RTMP is obviously fucked compared to the alternatives.

Re:Not all optimization is technical in nature.

[immaterial]

What are you smoking? "HTTP" has zero "buzzword-factor," and the average Internet user (clueless executive or otherwise) doesn't connect it with anything, beyond (maybe, if they're paying the slightest bit of attention) "those pointless extra letters in the address bar."

There Goes My Undeserving Superiority

[selex]

Now I can't stick my nose up at all those iPhone uses when I show them Flash enabled web content on my Droid. Thanks Adobe. Selex

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