Flash Sucks

And let freedom ring. Hallelujah.

Get It Try It

Ella Mae is 20 months old. She loves riding in the car with her Daddy. She loves singing along to her Daddy's Elvis collection. She's got over 1 million hits on YouTube.

But what you won't see unless you're running a system without that abominable Adobe Flash is that this clip is controlled by Sony ATV Publishing.



You can play the clip without Flash, but not at YouTube. There you'll be told you need Flash. That's a lie.

Sometimes YouTube clips will run embedded only at social sites like Twitter. The content providers and Google do different deals and create different schemes for different situations, and lots of cash changes hands.

The content providers are always interfering with things. Edgar Bronfman of Warner Music, formerly of the House of Seagram before he sold it off, once got Google to knock audio off movie clips at YouTube because you could hear 'his' content in the background. Now Sony ATV are doing the same thing to Ella Mae. Shame on them.

YouTube might tell you that you need Flash, but they're lying. The content providers demand it.

Steve Jobs didn't want Flash on any of his computers and devices; he was right. Flash sucks. It really sucks. It runs in software where today's technologies run in hardware, it melts your mobo, sucks up your VM, revs your fan, and makes your box run slow. It's shit.

But Flash has invasive technologies the content providers are greedy for. Flash can keep an eye on you and control you. Walk off the Earth's video for Red Hands couldn't be viewed in Germany because of a conflict between Google and GEMA, so German viewers suffered as a result.

An American Trilogy

'An American Trilogy' is a medley of THREE 19TH CENTURY SONGS, but the content providers still have their claws in it. So sweet Ella Mae can't sing in the back seat of her Daddy's car without the content police coming after her.

Flash sucks. Edgar Bronfman sucks. Sony ATV Publishing and GEMA suck. They all suck. It's time for the 'free' HTML5 to take over, to take YouTube out of their three-year beta, time for Google to stop lying to people, and time for the content usurpers providers to stuff it.