There is a shift that has been happening across the web that has been precipitated by mobile device manufacturers and their exclusion of key operating software on newer devices. In particular, Apple products have not supported Adobe Flash on their mobile devices for the past year and a half. Flash was the standard for anything that moved on a web site for a very long time. Since 2010, Apple and Adobe have been publicly at odds with each other. Adobe finally blinked late last year when they announced they would work with rival coding, such as HTML5, on mobile devices and give up pushing Flash for it.

What that means for your web site is this: if you have any video or animation on your site that was coded before 2012, it more than likely will not be able to be viewed on a mobile device. As the mobile computing market continues to emerge, it will become important that you convert your old video to a new format. There are a couple of options available to you when you convert old video. One option is to create an off-site account with a video service such as YouTube and link all of your video clicks to it. There are positives and negatives to doing this. On the plus side, you don't have to worry about formatting for desktop or mobile audiences. This is taken care of by YouTube. On the minus side, remember that YouTube is a social networking site and anyone viewing your video can leave a comment, be it true, false or somewhere in between. When you sign up with YouTube, you are giving up control over any content anyone chooses to leave behind, including your competition, disgruntled customers, or the 14 year-old computer nerd who amuses himself by leaving profane memos on message boards.

If you choose to keep all the content on your own site and within your control, there are rather simple conversions that can be done to reprogram the video. In essence, your old video can be converted with code that distinguishes what kind of browser is being used. It then opens up the version of the video that fits the format. Current Android versions are still reading Flash content or HTML5. Apple iPhones or iPads need a HTML5 version of your video. Before you jump on board with this solution, I would suggest you do a little homework and take a look at your web stats to find out what mobile device platforms have been browsing your site. You may find that you are being viewed by a lot of Apple products. This would constitute a change away from the old format. You might find that most of the mobile devices looking at you are Androids. If so, your options are more open. You might find that you have attracted a large Blackberry audience (although the Blackberry market share is shrinking). This would constitute another change to your viewing options.

 From a marketing perspective, it may make more sense to redo the old video now. Whenever a change like this occurs, it makes sense to take a look at the content of those old videos and decide if they should be re-shot. If you have been thinking along these lines anyway, now is your opportunity. Video, especially if it shows people, ages quite quickly. Hairstyles change. The frames of glasses go out of vogue. What is in and what is out in clothing styles and colors vary. If you are showing product on your company web site video, you may have repackaged it since the video was shot. In marketing, it is very important to stay up with the times, otherwise you can look irrelevant. Even if you don't want to go to the trouble of re-shooting all of your old videos, you may want to send it back to the editor to re-purpose old footage. A new voice over, new audio and new graphics can go a long way to help keep your web videos fresh.

Adobe brings Flash-free-Flash to Apple iPad, iPhone, by Jonny Evans, Computerworld, September 9, 2011 http://blogs.computerworld.com/18922/adobe_brings_flash_free_flash_to_apple_ipad_iphone