Wow… Has it really been 2 years already? That means I joined Adobe 2 years and 8 months ago. Wow… Time does fly when you’re having fun! :D A year ago, I wrote a blog post looking back at my first year as an evangelist. I thought I should make this a tradition and thus here’s year two…

While I definitely travelled less this year (mostly thanks to economy and thanks to the fact that our European team has grown quite a bit) I still managed to talk to a guesstimated 14000 people (same as last year) on 34 trips (compared to 53 trips last year). On average, a trip was 2.85 days so I spent about 97 days away from home (163 days last year). I visited 25 different cities in Europe, the US, the Middle East and Asia, which gave me a carbon footprint of about 15000 kg.

Blog visits grew 200% compared to last year with visitors coming from 197 different countries. The top 5 countries are the US, Belgium, the UK, Germany and to my surprise India in 5th place. 33.4% of all the traffic on my blog came from referring sites (thanks for the links!). My Adobe On Twitter post was the most popular post this year getting 4.8% of all the traffic this year. May 11th was the best day for my blog when my blog post about the release of the new NY Times reader was featured on Techmeme.

My “Create Flex Components with Flash CS4 Professional” video is my most popular video tutorial on Vimeo. Looking at my Vimeo account just made me realize that I should really pick this up again. So my goal for the rest of the year is to put up some new tutorial videos. Keep an eye on my blog, Adobe TV or Vimeo account…

This has been another spectacular year with plenty of highlights… but if I had to pick one, I would say that my demo in the day 2 keynote at MAX in Los Angeles was probably my biggest highlight of the year. The audience, the venue and the team behind MAX made this a truly amazing experience. One I hope to repeat many times! I also had a lot of fun building the MAX widget. It was amazing to see the numbers the widget generated and therefore a big thank you to all of you who installed it on your blogs, Facebook pages etc. Aah man… Seriously… Just picking one or two highlights isn’t enough. There’s also my trip to India, the trip to Israel, … Yes… This really is a cool job! ;-)

Oh… Speaking of cool jobs… You may have heard that my good friend and colleague Andrew Shorten is moving into a new role at Adobe. That means we need a replacement for Andrew. Those are some mighty big shoes to fill but if you feel like you could be a perfect candidate for the job, check out Andrew’s post about the job and make sure you send us your resume today.

Year 3 has just started and I can already tell you it’s going to be a very interesting year! I’m really excited about getting Flash Player 10.1 on devices, the imminent release of AIR 2.0, Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst… It’s going to be another amazing year!

Last week, when the news broke about the number of downloads “that other browser plugin” got, it got me thinking… What does that number really mean in terms of impact?. Can you really use download numbers as a way to measure how successful a technology is? The answer is “no” and the reason is very simple: A download still doesn’t mean that the user installed it.

So how does Adobe measure the impact of the Flash Player? A few months back, Emmy Huang (product manager for Flash Player) wrote a comprehensive blog post about it. Emmy wrote:

It’s interesting to note that for Adobe, the number that is quoted is an “install” and not a “download” number. [...] We have an internal dashboard application to track the general “health” of Flash Player downloads and installs, and it can chart the data daily, weekly, monthly, etc. It uses XML feeds of our server log data from Akamai, our current CDN. The dashboard is useful in helping us 1) to understand our traffic so we can try to optimize things like install success rate, and catch problems with our installers or CDN delivery in a matter of days, and 2) get a sense of where our penetration might be in the penetration study in the next wave. The penetration study is only run once a quarter, and it’s hard to wait three months to know where we’re at. [...]

For “Player downloads” we count the attempted and successful downloads for all the player installers we post to the CDN (based on the related HTTP status codes), such as “swflash.cab” and “install_flash_player.exe” (note these numbers aren’t unique.) We also count the number of installs, which is the sum of requests for a small text file that a newly installed player requests the first time it is launched in the browser. That number is used as an estimate – we’ve had releases where the text file request wasn’t implemented or working on certain platforms, and since it is only requested once there are a number of reasons why it might not make it all the way to the server. [...]

As with any statistics, you should understand the methodology behind the numbers. But the good thing about that number is it is something you or another third party like Forrester, can independently test or verify — which makes it the more interesting and important number for Flash Player.

In a press release yesterday, comScore released the latest “Video Metrix” numbers. Once again, these numbers are record breaking and impressive!

In December 2008, Internet users in the US watched 14.3 billion online videos (yes… 14.3 billion videos in one month!). A big chunk of those were watched using Flash technology. I don’t have the specific numbers yet but looking at the list of video sites surveyed, I think it’s safe to say that Flash Video is the absolute number one video format on the web. In fact, 41 percent of all those videos were watched on YouTube.

The other numbers in this press release are absolutely amazing:

• 78.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 309 minutes of video, or more than 5 hours.
• 98.9 million viewers watched 5.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (59.2 videos per viewer). YouTube uses Flash Video.
• 48.7 million viewers watched 367 million videos on MySpace.com (7.6 videos per viewer). MySpace uses Flash Video.
• The duration of the average online video was 3.2 minutes.
• The duration of the average online video viewed at Hulu was 10.1 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten. Hulu uses Flash Video.

I think it’s pretty obvious that the Flash Video market share continues to grow. Then again, when 99% all internet users can watch Flash Video, why wouldn’t you use Flash Video? ;-) Go Flash!

Did you know it took 38 years for radio to get 50 million users? 13 years for TV to get to that number and 4 years for the Internet to get to 50 million users? (according to Discovery Channel)

Adopting new technology seems to go faster and faster and the Flash Player census numbers prove this every quarter. The most recent numbers (published just now), show that Flash Player 10 was installed on more than 55 percent of computers worldwide in just the first two months of its release! That means it will surpass 80 percent by the second quarter of 2009, far outpacing the installation rate of past versions of the software.

The AIR runtime has also been doing very well. In less than one year after its initial release, there have been more than 100 million installations of Adobe AIR! On top of that, there have been over 1 million downloads of the AIR software development kit (SDK), the free open source Flex framework and Adobe Flex Builder in the last 12 months.

A big thank you goes out to all the developers out there who are building cool apps on top of the Flash Platform. Flash on!

Update: Also check Adrian Ludwig’s blog post on how we measure these installations.

I recently came across a couple of serious misconceptions about Flash Video and I thought it was a good idea to set the record straight.

#1 – Flash Video is progressive download only.
While progressive download is an option, streaming live or pre-recorded content is also possible using a Flash media streaming server or service provider. Obviously Adobe has it’s own offering in this space but third party and open source alternatives are also available.

#2 – Streaming Flash Video is expensive.
With an open source alternative available, streaming Flash Video can cost as little as $0 (obviously not counting hardware or bandwidth costs).

#3 – Flash Video quality is terrible. Just look at YouTube.
With Flash Video, you can publish video to any quality ranging from a stamp-size video in a banner to 1080p full HD video. The publisher has complete control over the quality of the video.

#4 – Flash Video streams can’t be protected.
There are a couple of ways of protecting your Flash Video stream. Adobe’s Flash Media Server provides RTMP-based streaming directly into Flash Player, avoiding the browser cache. SSL encryption and additional authentication mechanisms can also be added to more directly target the client player (Whitepaper PDF). With the recently released Flash Media Rights Management Server, publishers can further protect their streams with DRM.

#5 – Flash is a closed format that works with proprietary video codecs.
Both the SWF file format specification and the FLV/F4V specification are available to the public as part of the Open Screen Project. Flash Video can be published with 3 different codecs which are part of the Flash Player (so no additional installs are required). The Sorenson Spark codec and On2′s VP6 codec are the oldest codecs. The industry standard H.264 video codec was added in Flash Player 9 and allows you to publish video to the Flash Player up to 1080p full HD video.

#6 – I can only use Flash Video in a browser.
Adobe AIR (available for Mac, Windows and Linux) allows you to build real desktop applications with web technologies including JavaScript, HTML and Flash. Since the Flash Player is at the heart of the AIR runtime, it is obvious that you can also use all of the Flash Player features including Flash Video. Adobe AIR 1.5 also supports the DRM capabilities provided by the Flash Media Rights Management Server.

#7 – Flash Video is difficult to use.
For developers: Adding Flash Video to a Flash project (made with Flash Professional or Flex and targeted for Flash Player or Adobe AIR) is as easy as adding any other asset to your project. If you can add an image to your project, you can also add Flash Video.
For end-users: The majority of internet users won’t need to install anything extra. 98.3% of all internet connected PCs have Flash Player 8 or higher installed, meaning they can instantly view Flash Video encoded with either the Sorenson Spark or On2 VP6 codec. 89.4% have Flash Player 9.0.115 installed. That version of the Flash Player has H.264 video and HE-AAC audio playback, multi-core support and hardware scaling of HD quality full-screen video. This means that most users can play your HD H.264 video from the instant the page is loaded.

#8 – Only YouTube uses Flash Video.
According to comScore, 80% (up from 72%) of online videos are viewed Worldwide using Adobe Flash technology. This makes Flash Video the #1 video format on the web. Renowned broadcasters like CNN, BBC, NBC, FOX and many others use Flash Video as their main video format.