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Image: Wikimedia Commons
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.
Our new print issue features “How YouTube Ate TV,” an oral history of the video-sharing site’s impact on entertainment, culture, and business as told by dozens of eyewitnesses past and present. As we stitched sound bites together into a story, it became clear that our interviews had provided an embarrassment of riches. Indeed, we had too many great stories and insights to cram into one magazine article.
So we expanded the online version of the article into five oral histories. Two are live on our site now, covering the company’s earliest days and acquisition by Google. Three more will roll out next week, bringing the story up to 2025—and, in the case of AI’s sweeping impact on the platform, beyond.
One of the joys of working on this project with my colleagues and fellow interviewers, María José Gutiérrez Chávez, Yasmin Gagne, Steven Melendez, and David Salazar, was having an excuse to think back to what the web was like 20 years ago. It’s not just that YouTube was brand new and rapidly becoming a necessity of everyday life. At the time, the whole proposition of being able to easily watch videos on the internet at all was a novelty. The technology that made it—and sites like YouTube—possible at all was Macromedia’s Flash.
By the time YouTube came along, Flash was more than a decade old. Initially known as FutureWave SmartSketch, it morphed from a drawing app for pen-based computers into a browser plug-in that allowed websites to offer more motion and interactivity than the early web could muster on its own. Flash jazzed up the internet without requiring much in the way of bandwidth or computing cycles—a critical virtue back in the days of pokey dial-up connections. A whole universe of Flash-enabled animations and games sprang up.
Flash was so manifestly useful that Netscape and Microsoft bundled it with their browsers. Eventually, the plug-in added support for video playback, dramatically simplifying a process that had formerly required clunky software such as RealPlayer. Instead of video being something you watch in a separate app with its own interface, it could be rendered right inside sites. That’s why YouTube was so easy to use. It also permitted the fledgling site to make its videos embeddable on any web page, spreading them all over the internet.
If you were online back then, you may recall all this. But I’m afraid Flash’s reputation was tarnished by what happened well after it helped YouTube become, well, YouTube.
A couple of months after YouTube was founded, Adobe agreed to acquire Macromedia. Once Flash came into its portfolio, the software giant aggressively stuffed the plug-in with new features. What had begun as a complement to the plain-vanilla web became a platform unto itself.
As Flash got more powerful, it lost its original sprightly nature. Increasingly, it was a bloated resource hog—something you reluctantly allowed onto your computer because a sizable percentage of the web wouldn’t work without it. In 2011, I wrote about how Flash had mucked up my MacBook Air, and how much better the laptop worked with the plug-in disabled. Did I mention that Flash also had some pretty significant security issues?
By the time I banished Flash from my Mac, the PC-centric web that had given us Flash in the first place was receding into history. Apple’s introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010 had put browsers onto new classes of gadgets with smaller displays and touchscreen interfaces. But Apple didn’t give Adobe the kind of technical access it needed to put Flash on an iPhone or iPad. On those devices, Flash content showed up as empty boxes.
In 2010, Steve Jobs published an open letter, “Thoughts on Flash,” that argued that Adobe’s software was rife with problems and Apple’s platforms were better off without it. Adobe—and a fair percentage of technology enthusiasts—saw Apple’s exclusion of Flash as being about locking out competition, not enhancing the user experience.
Now, Google’s Android mobile operating system could run Flash. And for a time, makers of Android devices considered that a major advantage. BlackBerry, the maker of the PlayBook tablet, even ran TV commercials trumpeting Flash support as a defining feature.
The only problem was that mobile Flash was awful. It taxed the devices of the period beyond their breaking point. Even if it had been more efficient, much of the world’s Flash content simply didn’t work well on a tiny touchscreen.
In 2011, Adobe gave up on mobile Flash. Then, a suite of open web technologies known as HTML5 largely replicated Flash’s features as part of web browsing’s basic functionality, no plug-in required. Many big sites started abandoning Flash, period. Adobe decided to wind down the technology in 2017 and stopped supporting it altogether in 2020. Today’s internet is entirely Flash-free.
I don’t miss Flash in the sense of thinking we were better off when it was central to our computing lives or fantasising about it coming back. Even in the days when Flash was quite pleasant, a single company bearing so much responsibility for how websites worked was never ideal. That became painfully clear when Adobe lost track of the values that had made Flash popular in the first place. When it finally died, I was able to reallocate the brain cells I’d dedicated to wrestling with it to happier pursuits.
Nevertheless, it was nice to remember the days when Flash’s impact on the web was largely positive. As a startup, YouTube got a lot of things right, such as seeing its users as a community, not just a morass of eyeballs. But none of that would have mattered if the internet had still been stuck in the RealPlayer era.
As Billy Biggs, a software engineer who’s been at Google and YouTube since 2006, put it when I spoke with him for our YouTube history, “Flash video is what made this all possible.” It was the right technology at the right time. That’s as much a part of its legacy as its later regrettable evolution and descent into obsolescence.
You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Harry McCracken is the global technology editor for Fast Company, based in San Francisco. He writes about topics ranging from gadgets and services from tech giants to the startup economy to how artificial intelligence and other breakthroughs are changing life at work, home, and beyond.