Last week’s much hyped and over-anticipated announcement of the Apple iPad (complete with last minute leaks and physical protests) has revealed more about the current state of the online media industries through the sheer weight of comment and discourse that has cracked and fizzled in the wake of the launch than the bright light shone by Apple’s latest vision of the future has done so itself.

Firstly, there has been the realisation amongst many that the iPad will not be an all-singing all-dancing imaginatron ™ designed to transcend previously uncrossed creative boundaries, but a rather more basic if well-designed offering aimed specifically at encouraging and supporting the consumption of digital media via wi-fi and 3G. It’s a niche product that fits neatly alongside the smart phone and personal computer categories but does not replace them. That’s the factual part finished(!) – there are plenty of discussions that focus on the iPad’s feature set so if you haven’t caught up with that yet, try Wikipedia’s iPad entry (that’s if it hasn’t been vandalised again!). At the time of writing, the Wikipedia article still contains comment about the product’s name resembling the common US English term for sanitary towel – believe me this is just the beginning…

So what else can be learned from the post-launch discussions? Well there certainly have been recriminations following Steve Jobs’ verbal snubbing of fellow heavy weight corporates Adobe and in particular the lack of Flash Player inclusion on the iTampax, sorry iPad, (not withstanding 3 years plus of no Flash on the iPhone)! We can safely ascertain that Adobe and Apple will not be mutually resolving the historically underperforming Flash Player for Mac in the near future whilst agreeing on a neat plan to march into new markets together over a nice cup of tea… Even more so after Adobe Evangelist Lee Brimelow’s amusing and hastily pulled down (by Adobe) hit back at Apple with his own vision of what content may look like on the iPad sans Flash including a HD porn site without any video – touché!

Have those memories of the school playground come flooding back yet?

Ok so no Flash on the iPad – what does this really mean? As far as online video delivery is concerned, Flash is by far the dominant format with HTML 5 and even Silverlight currently lagging a long way behind. Apple’s Quicktime Player and iPhone’s H.264 capability are important but pack nowhere near the same punch as the incumbent heavyweight – Flash video. What we are looking at are partially-compatible parallel systems as so often seen before thanks to the technological competivity and brinkmanship that seems to be an inherent part of the online media’s growth spurts.

For strategists, producers, developers, designers and the rest of us – we still need to cater for differing models of media consumption by using the best fit platforms and technologies that suit our target markets – nothing that new after all as that’s exactly what most of us have been doing all along. If we haven’t, then the strength of argument surrounding the iPad launch should serve to quash any reliance on a perceived dominant platform as this is ever an uncertain position and market leaders can lose out altogether before you know it. Not that it’s all doom and gloom for Adobe Flash because every cloud has a silver lining and as interoperability looks more like the saviour of otherwise closed systems, those systems will surely evolve.

Tags: Adobe, Apple, Flash, iPad, online media industries