"There's over 414 million people have the Flash player, that's 98 percent of the Web population that can enjoy Flash content. And we get, in fact, over 2.3 million downloads a day of the Flash player from people who come back to update it."
Macromedia product manager Jeremy Clark. The company is out with new tools... called Flash MX... for creating content... and a new version of the Flash player. The technology has enabled animation and interactivity on the Web... even at slow connection speeds. Now, Clark says video is being added to the mix. ESPN has been testing the MX tool...
"They've shot a stunt, a skateboarders stunt, they've got snowboarder and BMX stunts, they've shot it with a camera which allows them to film it from 36 different angles and using Flash they can import all these videos and then allow the user to control the angle from which they view it. It's kind of like The Matrix movie where you've got the same stuff that's filmed from all different angles. You can actually, while the stuff is going on, pause him in mid-air and then rotate it around and see all this stuff from different angles. So that's just one example of the kind of interactive video that will be enabled and we'll start to see with the next version of Flash."
And for the visually impaired... the new technology will allow screen readers to describe the action in the video. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.