Flash has been made available to the users of iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. The luxury of viweing Flash-based content has evaded the users of the aforementioned gadgets for a long time but now the ice has melted and Adobe had finally decided to offer its blessings. The media publishers can now deliver different content through the same stream to flash-enabled gadgets using Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5.

The content can be viewed in several platforms such as iOS, Windows, OS X, Android and others. However, Apple does not want to support Flash in its mobile devices for a number of reasons related to battery life and device performance. Rather, Apple would fully support HTTP Live Streaming. This is what video sharing websites like YouTube use to stream their content to iPads and iPhones. The entire  streaming would be done by Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5.

Media publishers can now buy the Adobe Flash Media Server to stream their content. This brings good news for them because this not only a new way to deliver content (which includes Flash animated presentation) but also a new way to protect content  and ensure quality user experience. With Flash Media Server 4.5, content owners can also create HTTP content.

Here are the features of Flash Media Server 4.5:

• Built-in content protection makes deployment simpler and lessens the cost of infrastructure, which would help the online videos that are funded by advertisers to stream seamlessly.
• The requirement of preparing and protecting assets in advance is eliminated with the help of On-demand Stream Packaging. This would lessen the complexity and also the storage costs. It would also simplify the process of publishing so now businesses can take a single set of source videos and send them to various downstream devices.

If a Mac desktop or Windows PC where Flash is installed, calls a video stream, the stream will be delivered automatically through Flash. If iOS calls a video stream, it will be delivered by Adobe via HTTP Live Streaming – and there would be nothing to worry about for the content provider.

However, this has nothing to do with playing Flash-based games on an iOS device or for that matter, viewing any Flash-based content such as Flash web animation on an iOS device.

This decision of Adobe would help them reach out to possibly the widest audience. Content owners would be able to provide content on a massive scale. Adobe will be helping a number of businesses to reach out to a huge number of customers and an increasing number of mobile devices.