The folks at Apple don"t care much for the products made by Adobe. Apple continues to refuse to add native support for Adobe"s Flash-based video and apps on its iPad and iPhone devices. Now Adobe has launched a new version of one of its products that will allow video makers to get around Apple"s iOS ban of Flash and have their creations show up on the iOS devices. The Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5 product makes this happen in part because of Apple"s support of HTTP Live Streaming.
In basic terms Flash video creators can use Flash Media Server 4.5 to run their creations on their local server and then stream those videos to products like the iPhone and iPad in a format that those devices support. That should finally open up a ton of videos that are still based on Flash to be shown on Apple"s mobile products. The video is also run on the server rather than the device itself which should allow iPhones and iPads to access them without as much processor power, battery drain or the buggy crashes that can happen when running Flash videos natively.
While this will be a huge change for Flash-based video makers, there"s a catch. The Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5 still won"t allow for iOS products to run other Flash-based applications such as animations, games and Flash-heavy web site designs. Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server 4.5 is now on sale for server operators for at $995 while Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 4.5 is on sale for $4,500.