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Adult industry sides with Apple over Flash's demise

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Another nail has been brutally hammered into Adobe Flash’s coffin with the porn industry coming out in support of HTML5, forming an unlikely thought alliance with Apple.
Apple’s Steve Jobs has certainly made no secret of his lack of faith in Flash, and his belief that the platform is dead or dying, but this is the first time the porn industry has weighed in on the matter.
Why is that significant? Well, for a start because the adult industry has a well-deserved reputation as a technology driver and decider. The industry famously helped VHS win the format war over Beta, and also hedged its bets correctly in the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD battle, months before Toshiba realized the technology was a non-starter. So, now it comes down to the battle of Flash vs HTML5, and the industry has spoken.

Talking to Conceivably Tech, Ali Joone, founder and director of Digital Playground (DP), a highly popular adult online network didn’t mince his words. “Mobile browsers run HTML 5 very well. Flash brings everything to a crawl and has an impact on battery life. With HTML 5, there is no reason to show our content in Flash.”
Indeed, many critics before Joone have complained of Flash’s buggy-ness and the battery/performance price paid by devices running it. Steve Jobs has been bleating on about this very point for months, not that we were inclined to give him much mind before DP and co. piped up for a new way forward in something of an Adobe gang bang.
“HTML 5 is the future,” Joone told CT, and coming from an industry which makes $13 billion in online revenues per year, and boasts 12% of all websites containing at least some form of pornographic content, that’s a comment to be taken seriously.
After all, it’s common knowledge that content is king and consumers choose the technology which offers them what they want. If consumers want porn (and they do), it seems they will likely move to HTML5, knowingly or unknowingly.
Of course developers are critical in this equation, as they will be the front line soldiers, making the critical decisions which could ultimately seal Flash’s fate. After all, it’s not as if Flash could not live happily ever after as an alternative to HTML5, but if developers have to choose to develop in one or another, they will go where the content goes, and the porn content at least, has chosen HTML5.
Having said that, for the time being DP admits it is still publishing content in Flash online, but only until IE8 and other browsers get with the HTML5 program.
“We are waiting for browsers to catch up. As soon as they are ready, we will move everything to HTML 5,” he said.
Meanwhile, there are no hard feelings from the industry towards a platform once instrumental to its online success. Joone expressed his gratitude for what Flash had done but added it was time to move on. “It’s the next passing of the torch,” he concluded.
Industry pundits also seem convinced. Tech-Guru and influencer Rahul Sood, founder of Voodoo PC and now CTO of gaming and advanced computing at HP noted, “The porn industry drops Flash. That would signal the official beginning of the end of Flash imho,” in a twitter update. Another insider told RCR, “I’ve had YouPorn on the iPad for weeks. Porn always leads.”
Sorry to be so blunt Flash, but it looks like you’re screwed.

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