It didn’t take very long. Skyfire’s servers are melting and their Flash to H.264 machines folded under the pressure. Hyperbole aside, Robert Oberhofer reported on the Skyfire blog that “user experience was performing well for the first few hours, but as the surge continued, the peak load on our servers and bandwidth caused the video experience to degrade.” So clearly people are looking to get Flash feeds on their iOS devices, so much, in fact, that Skyfire had to yank the plug on their application.
Skyfire is no longer available on the App Store. Due to popular demand, the company had to stop offering downloads until they’re able to bolster their network for the load. Hopefully it comes back to the App Store quicker than Camera+ did. Oh right, we’re still waiting on Camera+. Silly me.
If you don’t know what to think about this, you’re not alone. In one breath people praise Apple’s move to eliminate Flash support on the iPhone, and with the next they’re sneaking off to watch Flash video on their iPhones. Sure, it’s not really flash video coming into the device, but the message is received loud and clear: people want to be able to access their videos online, Flash or other, without any problems. <joke>That, or they really like being able to stream illegitimate television feeds from sketchy websites. My first inclination is the latter, but I just call it like I see it.</joke>
It’s still too early to tell if Skyfire is going to be a problem for the device, and there’s certainly some security concerns about the application. But, if the Skyfire team can pull this off, they may have solved a problem that many gave up on long ago—bringing Flash video to iOS.
Article and Screenshot Via Skyfire Blog
Photo Credit: Macserve.net
Update: Added <joke> tags.
