When I read about it at
Stefan's blog I thought the
echo chamber was going to do its job fast so I'm rather surprised I haven't read about it anywhere else because I think this is a big deal.
Long story short: Flash player 10 has P2P super-powers. I first heard about this from Hank Williams (
here,
here,
here and
here) but it wasn't clear at that time what would the player exactly do. Now it's a little bit more clear, I quote from the
FAQs:
End User to End User: Two clients communicate directly without passing their data through the server for low-latency, real-time communication. This is the solution that Adobe is enabling with RTMFP.
In English: Video chat and Voice over IP. This is fantastic news for my Mum. I'm going to build a mega-simple, easier to use than Skype, no registration needed, audio-video chat so we can easily talk. Also opens up for multi-player games. Maybe screensharing too?
Swarming: Many to many communication typically used to share delivery a file via download. [...] Flash player 10 and AIR 1.5 will not enable swarming solutions.
In English: No eMule in Flash. Probably Adobe doesn't want to mess up with RIAA and the likes.
Multicast: One to many communication over an IP infrastructure. Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5 will not enable multicast solutions.
In English: If you want one-to-many communication, please go to the Flash Media Server section, thanks. Why would Adobe want to create competitors for their own commercial products?
But all this is
not Stratus, all this is the new RTMFP protocol. You still need need
something to connect 2 Flash players together. And
that is Stratus, a beta service to be launched in December. At least testing the beta is free, you only need to register with your Adobe ID to get a developer key for your app.
So, even with the technical limitations I think this is very good news and keeps opening up what we can do with Flash.
How nice!