It’s Saturday, April 20, 2024 and 65°F in Austin, Texas

Skyfire 2.0 for iPhone Released Very, Very Briefly

Skyfire 2.0, a browser application for the iPhone which supposedly allowed its users to view flash based videos, was released in the Apple store, and then quickly pulled reportedly due to strain on the company's servers.

The $2.99 application was supposed to convert flash based videos into HTML5 based videos by uploading the videos to the Skyfire servers, converting it, and then streaming it back to users directly from the Skyfire servers. Read more about te app here:

http://www.bgr.com/2010/11/02/skyfire-for-ios-approved-with-flash-to-html5/

Predictably (in my opinion), this "stressed the company's servers to the max."  So after a few hours in the Apple iOS App Store, the application was pulled. Reportedly the company plans on beefing up their backend infrastructure and relaunching the application.

Given the tremendous amount of Flash based video content that is available on the web, but not available on the iPhone due to its lack of support for Flash, there is definitely a pent up demand for a product that allows viewing of this content. While the idea to do an "on the fly" conversion is an inventive solution, it may arguably be an ill-advised solution due to the large bandwidth and processing power needed for this type of conversion.

It will be interesting to see if Skyfire can ever beef up its servers enough to handle such a resource intensive service desired by millions of iPhone users -- the ability to view Flash based videos.

Austin Texas Web Design