AARON SIMPSON: Why did you decide to open a NY studio?
CHRIS P: Really, it was an easy decision to make. I came up in NY. I went to SVA and worked primarily at MTV in the mid-to-late nineties. I always thought I’d work in New York or at least be bi-coastal – a concept I’d recently given up on. I had resigned myself to a life in LA. When Shannon and I got the call from Adult Swim that they were interested in Titmouse starting a studio in NY, we jumped at the chance. Holy Shit! It might just be possible! We still kept in touch with a bunch of East coast artists. A lot of our family lives in New York and New Jersey. If we had been asked to start a studio in another city, it would have been a way harder decision. New York feels like home. It just made sense.

AS: What projects have been moving thru the NY pipe?
CP: In addition to short form stuff, we’re doing a pretty good amount of TV series work. Currently, we’re working on Metalocalypse, Superjail!, The Venture Brothers and Motorcity in the NY studio. We’ve also done some video game and commercial work. We pretty much just love making cartoons.

AS: Do some Titmouse projects involve artists and staff from both studios – bi-coastal production?
CP: Absolutely! We really like to think of the NY and LA studios as one super-brain-art-entity. We send work back and forth all the time. Sometimes one coast will do pre-production and the other will do production. Other times we’ll work on all aspects of the production in both studios. Animation often happens on both coasts. Whenever possible, we try to keep as much animation as we can in the states – rather than shipping overseas to Korea. On some shows the pipeline is set up for shipping (such as Venture). On most of the others we keep the animation on-site. As an animator, it’s great to work with other animators. It’s something that’s important to us as an artist-run studio. If we can possibly do the work in house, we find a way to do it!

AS: What technology do you use to manage this bi-coastal pipeline?
CP: All sorts! I really dig this software called cineSync. It allows us to do bi-coastal dailies in sync without dropping frames (most of the time). The production management pretty much runs on Filemaker. Ben Kalina over here is awesome at figuring out tracking and pipeline stuff. He programs scripts and shit! Crazy! And we’ve had some custom plug-ins written for Flash that seem to help out a bit. It depends on the artist and their personal work preferences. Hooray for computers! Another technology we use at both studios is the kegerator – it keeps the beer at a drinkable 36 degrees.

AS: What’s the biggest struggle operating on two coasts?
CP: It’s just been corporate culture stuff. I wish I could be in New York more. It’s tough to give the same kind of face-to-face encouragement across a Skype call. We have a really talented crew of both experienced folks I know from my 10 years living in NY and brand new talent, right out of school. I wish I could spend more time getting to know the new folks. I mostly interact with the NY crew during dailies for 30 minutes, every other day, on a computer screen. It’s amazing and cool that this technology even exists, but nothing beats being in the same room. I thank my lucky stars for Kayla and PeeDee. Without them it would all fall apart – and it would be a lot less fun!

Last year we were able to do our annual 5 Second Day of independent animation at both studios on the same day. That was one of the studio culture events that translated really well. Every year, we shut down the studio for a day and everyone makes their own cartoon – whatever they want. Then we screen them the next day. We plan to do it again this year. We’ve been doing it in LA for the past 4 years. It’s one of the ways we select artists for our independent shorts program. We hope to produce some of our future short films with our NY animator/directors.

AS: Any rivalries emerging between the two studios?
CP: I think of it as healthy competition. Animators want to animate. Nobody wants to have the shittiest scene in dailies. I think the two studios push each other to do better work. If you see a scene that inspires you in dailies, you try to inspire someone else at the next one. Artists want to impress other artists! The artists have even started their own Titmouse studio blog where both coasts contribute beautiful drawings of some very crude subject matter. Maybe there’s a rivalry about who can illustrate the best dick joke.

AS: What trends are you seeing in the US animation industry?
CP: Technology allows us to do a lot more in the states. If we were producing some of these shows 5 years ago, we would absolutely be shipping to Korea. A digital pipeline and a high speed connection allows us to keep more work here in North America. The New York studio has allowed us greater flexibility than having a studio in LA alone. When faced with the reality that we couldn’t afford to do some of the work in the LA studio, normally our only option would be shipping overseas. Now that we have the NY studio in place, we are able to provide a bunch of entry level positions (such as animation cleanup) to recent graduates right out of school. We are really trying our best to help build the NY animation community, and as this young crop of super talent grows and gains experience we’ll be able to grow the studio with them and promote them into better and better positions. Today’s new kids are tomorrow’s directors!

AS: What’s your take on the growing online animation industry (YouTube, Hulu, iTunes, etc)?
CP: Online is clearly the future. Shit, it’s not even the future – it’s the present. As much as I love TV and Hollywood movies, I think they’re destined for the same path as the record companies. This is great news for the independent animator. As the distribution gatekeepers become more accessible it’s easier to produce animation without the big studios. Like everyone else, we are stoked to experiment in the wild west of digital distribution. Yeeehaw!

At the end of the day, I’m super proud of the artists in the NY studio and the work they are creating. It’s incredible. I never dreamed it would work out so well. These guys kick so much ass it makes my brains explode. It makes laser beams shoots out of my tears ducts in joy. Hooray for New York and hooray for cartoons. This is just the beginning…

AS: …which brings us to the end. Thanks, Chris, for giving us the low down on your lower Manhattan studio (which, by the way, has a new address – 129 W. 27th Street, 8th Floor New York, NY 10001).

After gestating the concept online, Clark developed the series with David M. Stern (The Simpsons, Monk), who also served as an EP on the project. Clark and Stern then turned to two animation studios to bring the show to life. First on the job was Augenblick Studios (Superjail!), appropriately based on Brooklyn, for development and pre-production, and then the majority of the Flash animation was produced at Cuppa Coffee Studios (Glenn Martin, DDS) in Toronto.

With the first batch of episodes under his belt, Clark took some time to answer a few questions for CHF, and below that we quiz Augenblick Studios founder Aaron Augenblick.

SIMPSON: Huge congrats on the new series. A big premiere back in March, positive reviews and now the additional episode order for October 2010.

CLARK: I feel amazingly lucky to get the opportunity to have one of my ideas brought to life; and to have so many fantastic, creative and smart people helping. But it’s funny, I’ve been so caught up in production, so busy, sometimes I feel like I don’t even get an opportunity to get excited about how big a deal it is. So, only recently, I’ve been like “Oh, this is a show I made. It’s on air. Holy cow.”

SIMPSON: Take us back to before the Atom.com deal.

CLARK: For years, I was doing a lot of freelance motion graphic stuff like broadcast design and along the way I formed certain relationships with studios and networks. And in ’05 or ’06, there was this big push for a lot of the networks to have Web portals with video content – sites like Super Deluxe, Motherload and even AOL was dropping tons of money into cool little web shows. So, I pitched some stuff to IFC, Spike, and Super Deluxe. And I didn’t really get very far with any of it. But, the one that kind of resonated was when I pitched 5ON.

SIMPSON: Why do you think that was?

CLARK: It was just more fleshed out as far as the look and feel. One of the biggest challenges I found with pitching animation is you really need visual proof in order for people to get the idea. With live action you can do say, “I’m going to do this,” and they be like, “I totally, I get it.” So, I had a lot more visuals for 5ON and I think that’s what helped. And it was, you know, a funny idea, I feel like. And there was actually interest both from IFC and Comedy Central, but Comedy Central seemed like a better fit so I ended up going that way.

SIMPSON: So you made the 6 shorts, and then how did the TV discussion start?

CLARK: So after I was done, Dan Powell, the executive at Comedy Central who I pitched to, said, “why don’t you pitch this world back to us as a TV show?” And so, I think that was like within maybe three months after the last episode of 5ON went and Dan said, “let’s try to make this thing bigger.” And so I did. I wrote it out and then I pitched as a TV series and we kind of went from there. I mean, obviously, this is my first TV show and so I think it was pretty clear early on that I wasn’t going to be writing for this show.

SIMPSON: And you knew that you’d be….

CLARK: …directing and designing the characters. So, we started approaching different people and that’s how we ended up connecting with David Stern.

SIMPSON: And when you first talked to David, did you hit it off right away?

CLARK: Well, we contacted a couple other possible writers and one of them like wanted to make it a live action show. No one really seemed to understand the sensibility, the humor that we were creating by having absurd and horrific creatures completely normalized in a human world. But the minute we sat down with David, he instantly got it. He Said “I know what you’re trying to do here, but I think it’s really funny and I think we can make this work.”

We initially set it in Washington, DC, and David said “That’s totally the wrong angle. You’ve got to do it here. New York’s where all the weirdos are.” And he’s been fantastic to work with ever since.

SIMPSON: How did you kick off the development process?

CLARK: We went out just grabbed beers and chatted. I tried to dump as much of the world into his brain as possible so he could start writing the pilot script. And after meeting with him a couple of times and a few drafts on the pilot, we had a pretty solid episode. And then it’s a very weird process. After doing the full episode script, the development execs said, “we actually want to make this into a pilot but we only do half episode pilots.” So we cut it in half, and that’s a very weird, backwards way of writing.

SIMPSON: And then you produced the pilot.

CLARK: Yes, and then they said, “The pilot’s really great and now we want to make this back into the first episode.” So, we had to add 11 more minutes into it. But at that point, so much had changed in order to make it work as an 11 minute pilot that it was almost impossible. But, I have to say, I think we did a pretty good job.

SIMPSON: And is the world we see in the series far different than what in the 11-minute pilot?

CLARK: Oh yeah, because we ended up building out background stories for everything, like even for weird, background characters. And we designed them all and this really help the writers who print them out and put up all over the writing room and come up with crazy creation myths. So, there’s definitely a lot more – and like figuring out how all these bizarre, horrific creatures would actually function within our world. Like what kind of stores, products and restaurants would they actually go to and what kind of services would need to be available in order to make this all work. So, that’s the fun for me.

SIMPSON: And you’re incorporating actual New York into it.

CLARK: Yeah, and the outside exterior of Mark and Randall’s apartment you see in the episode, is actually the exterior of that address in real life. So, I don’t know who actually lives there in that apartment but in our version of New York, they do. This is a New York show. Obviously, Cuppa Coffee also helped us in Toronto, but a big chunk of this show was created by people who live here in New York. So, that’s a lot of fun for us.

SIMPSON: Have you guys come up with a set of rules that help define the show’s structure?

CLARK: There’s definitely rules. But there’s been a big effort to make this show a much more traditional sitcom. So, it’s not as scatological and weird as, say, the Adult Swim stuff. But as far as like limitations, I don’t like the idea of having Gods and Super Heroes involved in this world, because I feel like those kinds of characters are hard to normalize and I think that they really throw off the whole balance of the world. But, in one instance, we have a counseling session and they’re watching this extremely violent slideshow and terrible things are happening and the audience is freaking out and it cuts to all these different reaction shots. And one of them is Buddha going, “Jesus Christ,” you know. So, I was like, “That’s a funny joke. Let’s throw it in there.”

SIMPSON: There’s been a handful of shows that have made the leap from the web to TV. Do you think this is a valuable development path?

CLARK: Well, I think it’s a pretty awesome and unique way of approaching new talent, especially coming from someone who has no experience creating a TV show. What other way is there to get your work seen but do it on a small scale? To try and jump in and do a full TV show is impossible. The web allows anyone with a good idea the chance to create content and to put it out there. So, the fact that networks started identifying that and using that as a way of approaching new talent – I think it’s very smart and I’m sure to some degree it saved them money down the road with having to create full pilots.

SIMPSON: What would you say the animator community is like in NYC?

CLARK: I mean it’s a pretty small community. There aren’t a lot of animation companies out here. That’s good in some regards, because it’s nice to have that level of intimacy with the people involved in the scene. But it also means that there’s a limited amount of production that can get done here. But, especially within the last two years, I’ve had a lot of friends who work in the business at the big studios and then there’s like 150 people laid off. It seems like a lot tougher of a business here in New York than it is like in say L.A. and Toronto.

SIMPSON: Do you have thoughts for the up and coming animator show pitcher who’s, you know, got a couple ideas rattling around? They may want to pitch, you know, to one of the adult animation networks?

CLARK: Yeah, definitely. A while back, Fred Seibert created Oh Yeah! Cartoons, which kind of did the same thing that some of these web networks are doing. He approached young talent, gave them enough of a budget to do a short film, and hoped for the best. But I pitched him a bunch of stuff years ago for Oh Yeah! Cartoons and it was there that I kind of learned one of the biggest lessons about pitching shows – your passion and your excitement for the show needs to be extremely visible. I came to him with ideas for kids shows because I knew that’s what he was looking for and I think he was aware of it right away that my heart wasn’t fully into it. And he said to me, “Could you imagine spending the next four years working on this show?” And I was like, “Whoa, no way.”

SIMPSON: And how did that change your approach to pitching?

CLARK: Well, I went back to the drawing board, and I was like, “I love comics. I love horror. I love comedy.” And 5ON was born out of that. It drew on a lot of the elements that I was really excited and passionate about. And I loved coming up with all these crazy, weird characters and creations. And I think that passion and that excitement was visible because it was something that I was really stoked on trying to bring to life. And so, I guess that’s my advice. You have to really, really love the idea that you’re trying to get made. You have to feel that “I’m going to do this no matter what.”

SIMPSON: Did you use any references to help translate your thoughts about the production design to Augenblick?

CLARK: Both Aaron and I share a huge love for EC Comics and that’s definitely where we get alot of our reference. I mean those old horror and sci-fi comics were really dark and grainy and really inky and had a lot of shadows, and we just loved that world. We even pull from that world for the palette and the colors we use. Obviously, we can’t be as sketchy and loose as a lot of those old comics were since it’s an animated show. We love Will Eisner, Will Elder, Johnny Craig, all those guys.

On that note, we turn to Augenblick Studios founder Aaron Augenblick (also read CHF interviews from 2005 and 2008).

SIMPSON: How did Ugly Americans find its way to Augenblick Studios?

AUGENBLICK: Dan Powell was my producer when we made Golden Age for Comedy Central and we were always hoping to work together again. When he was developing Ugly Americans, he arranged for me to meet with David Stern and Devin Clark and we all hit it off. We made a pilot together which quickly led to a 7 episode series.

SIMPSON: How is Flash being used on the production – more as a design and traditional animation tool? A puppet tool? A mixture?

AUGENBLICK: We use Flash for everything. From design to finished animation, everything is hand-drawn directly in Flash.

SIMPSON: How did the show evolve, design wise, from the initial online shorts?

AUGENBLICK: When they told me that they wanted to make Ugly Americans a horror/comedy, my mind immediately went to EC Comics. Devin was also a big fan so we dove in head first. I was really excited to try using the visual language of the greats (Harvey Kurtzman, Wally Wood, Al Feldstein, etc.) as a launching point for the storytelling in Ugly Americans.

SIMPSON: How do make sure a character is streamlined enough to be “animatable” on a half-hour show? (not too inky, etc.)

AUGENBLICK: In recent years I have tried to avoid the thick vector line like the plague. We use a single thick brush and real in-betweens to achieve the traditional “comic-book” look. I tend to like things that look really busy so I don’t streamline things too much. I love that Randall has crusty skin and scars all over his body because it’s really fun to draw.

SIMPSON: How much comedy is added in the animation process that’s not there in the script?

AUGENBLICK: Filling every inch of the screen with nonsense is one of our favorite things to do at the studio. Will Elder called it “chicken fat.” The visual gags are both scripted and created by our artists.

SIMPSON: How did the Superjail! production effort prepare your studio for this?

AUGENBLICK: After surviving Superjail!, I feel like our studio can withstand anything.

SIMPSON: Devin mentioned that a number of background layouts are based on actual New York locations. Do any in particular stick out in your mind?

AUGENBLICK: Mark Lilly’s apartment is an exact replica of our artist Kris Wollinger’s apartment in Chinatown. If you play the online Ugly Americans game you can find out his exact address. Strangers can visit him anytime!

SIMPSON: What else is cooking at Augenblick Studios these days?

AUGENBLICK: We have a very exciting new project called Cartoon Show. I created and wrote the idea with my head animator Chris Burns. We are currently in negotiations with a major network for a series. I’m really looking forward to making a psycho pilot.

Whether or not Apple allows Flash on the iPhone doesn’t really effect us animators. Our Flash animations are enjoyed by the viewer in the same way whether they’re delivered in an FLV, an HTML5 video player or an MPEG-4. But it sure has complicated things, especially for artist using the software for more interactive projects. Animators like Allan Dye (Pocket God) working are on iPhone games have had to go through complicated production methods to translate their Flash animated elements (and the accompanying XML) into the iPhone environment. Sites we love like Newgrounds, which feature primarily SWF-based animations and games, simply aren’t accessible on the growing suite of Apple’s mobile devices.

To shed some light on how this all started, and where it’s left us, we’re going back to the source. We welcome back Jonathan Gay, the iPhone-carrying co-creator of Flash (then called “FutureSplash”), who we interviewed in 2008. Gay left Adobe in 2005, and has since founded and sold an energy management software start-up along with fellow Flash pioneers Robert Tatsumi and Gary Grossman. Below, he starts by addressing some of the criticism Apple Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs has flung at Flash.

AARON SIMPSON: Do you think Flash should be more open, or as Jobs put it – less of a “closed system?”

JONATHAN GAY: It’s a messy question. With any technology, like Flash, the web or the Internet, where there are millions of people who have invested money and energy into making it part of their lives and their businesses, it’s important for there to be a good steward of that technology. The open source and standards body approach is one way for that stewardship to happen but having a good corporate steward of the technology is also a successful model. I believe that Macromedia, followed by Adobe, have done a good job of being stewards of Flash.

It’s disappointing to me that the media is letting Steve get away with dinging Flash on it’s openness while Apple advocates a much more closed model of application development.

The fact that Steve wrote a letter explaining their position suggests how powerful the demand for Flash is from their partners and customers. While I respect a desire to provide a quality experience to customers, it looks to me that keeping Flash out of the iPhone is a simple competitive choice on Apple’s part. Apple wants to displace Flash’s role in video delivery on the Web with the H.264 standard and Apple wants developers to build custom applications for the iPhone and not cross platform applications. Both of these goals support Apple’s business goals driving their closed iPhone application platform but are destructive to openness on the web. In particular, the stranglehold on video technology that the group of large consumer companies that control the MPEG video patent pool have been pushing toward for decades is very destructive to openness.

When we wanted to add video support to Flash, there were two key challenges we had to confront. First, we were afraid that by adding video, we would cause larger video companies like Microsoft, Real Networks and Apple to attack Flash competitively. We took the risk, added video to Flash and made delivering short form video integrated in a web page a good experience. As a result, Flash is a key video technology on the Web. In some ways, I think Steve’s campaign against Flash is finally the competitive response to the success of Flash in the video market by a powerful company that we were afraid of many years ago.

The second challenge was selecting a video codec. We wanted to use the cool new H.264 open standard but Macromedia did not feel they could afford the H.264 license fee. I believe that the capped $5M per year H.264 license fee was similar in scale to the annual Flash engineering budget at the time. The H.264 license fee model is very anticompetitive. H.264 licensing is free for very small users, expensive for medium size companies and inexpensive for very large companies. This model puts the midsize companies who could challenge the dominant companies at a significant competitive disadvantage and is the reason that we implemented the proprietary but affordable On2 codec in Flash instead of the open and expensive H.264 codec. The capped license fee also discourages large companies from building a competitor to H.264 because they can simply pay the capped license fee and know they are managing their patent risk and suppressing their smaller competitors. For example, it would have cost Macromedia $5M per year to add H.264 to Flash but it probably cost Adobe much less to add H.264 because they were probably already paying a substantial fee for their video editing products. You can probably thank the success of Flash video for the fact that streaming H.264 video over the Internet is free for another 5 years. Solving this patent license problem is probably why Google purchased On2. However, if they open source the latest On2 codec as people suspect they want to, it’s much easier to launch a patent lawsuit against them because anyone can inspect the source code. Given the large number of patents in the video space, it may not actually be possible to build an open source codec that does not inadvertently infringe on someone’s patent. The MPEG Licensing Authority solves the problem in a Borg-like way by adding any new patent challengers to their patent pool.

AARON: From your perspective, how much would the Flash player need to evolve before it would meet Steve Job’s strict efficiency standards?

JON: It’s worth noting that Flash was developed on a 66 Mhz 486 which is probably one tenth the speed of an iPhone. So I don’t think there is a fundamental architectural issue. I think the Flash architecture with the binary file format is inherently higher performance than HTML for multimedia.

I think Adobe is doing the right things by evolving the player to take more advantage of hardware acceleration when it is available. In Flash’s early days, we avoided becoming dependent on hardware acceleration because the computers that had hardware acceleration also tended to have fast processors and it was not really our mission to encourage people to create content that would only work well on a fast processor with hardware acceleration. With mobile devices, moving graphics and video processing to customer hardware saves battery power and Adobe is working on this. Generally, I think the iPhone should have plenty of processing power to run existing Flash content with reasonable performance. It’s always important when building media content to keep in mind the constraints of the delivery platform and I think that even without much performance work, Flash Player could deliver a good experience on the iPhone.

I think Steve Jobs is willfully missing a key point with his arguments against Flash. The important reason to put Flash on the iPhone is that millions of developers have invested millions of hours building Flash content in Flash. The Flash content out there in the world is an asset of our society and the people who created it. People built it in Flash because there was no other decent technology from companies like Apple, Microsoft or Real Networks that enabled this kind of content to be created and delivered. To say that all this content should be discarded because Steve Jobs is afraid that people will build Flash content that runs on mobile devices running any operating system instead of building content that will only work on Apple mobile devices is doing a disservice to the efforts of all those individuals. Personally, I think that Flash content will probably outlive iPhone and iPad apps because Flash is designed to deliver media content while the iPhone/iPad development tools are designed to build applications for a specific hardware platform that will be obsolete in 5 or 10 years. Many years ago, we talked about the idea of “Forever Flash.” The idea was that it should be possible to create interactive multimedia content with a lifetime like a famous book, painting, or movie. The content should be able to be part of human history and be able to be preserved for hundreds of years. I’m not sure if that will happened or not, but it’s easier to imagine that cross platform content like Flash can achieve that than mobile applications dependent on a particular operating system.

AARON: As an iPhone user, do you feel like the device would benefit from the addition of Flash?

JON: I do use an iPhone and think it would be great if it could use Flash, although I think that a lot of Flash content on the Web would be awkward to use on the small screen. I suspect that when it’s time to replace my iPhone, my next phone will be an Android phone.

AARON: Well, you can have that bigger screen on an iPad. Have you picked one up yet?

JON: I have not tried an iPad yet. The concept of the device is certainly appealing, but I don’t like the limitations that Apple places on application creation and distribution. The openness of the personal computer and the Web have led to so many great and unexpected things. The iPhone/iPad model certainly has some of the appealing traits of the personal computer market but it also borrows heavily from the business models used by the cell phone, and cable industries. With my computer, I feel like I own it and can do what I want with it. With my iPhone and with an iPad, it’s more like you are leasing a device for a few years until the battery wears out and it’s time to buy the new one. It’s a good business model for Apple, but as a consumer, I like to do whatever small things I can to encourage a world with more openness and hardware designed for a longer lifetime. It really seems to me that the easily scratched displays, easily dented cases and difficult to replace batteries in Apple mobile devices will cause people to replace their devices sooner than they might with a device that is designed for a longer lifetime.

AARON: Do you believe the assertion that Flash causes the majority of Mac crashes?

JON: I don’t know. Flash performance and stability on the Mac has been a problem. Lately, I’ve been experiencing as much slowness and hangs on DHTML pages in Safari as I have with Flash content. Certainly Adobe could have done a better job here, but Apple has also made it more difficult to build a reliable web browser plug-in than Microsoft. There aren’t very many browser plug-ins beyond Flash that people use to help ensure that the plug-in interfaces are reliable and up to date. My main thought here is that any problems that are present can easily be solved by Apple and Adobe working together to make web multimedia reliable for their customers.

AARON: Jobs also jabbed Flash for having a bad security record. Do you think that’s warranted?

JON: I don’t think so. I think Adobe has done a good job on security with Flash. Any Internet software written in C++ is going to have security challenges. It’s inherent in the complexity of the technology.

AARON: Let’s go back a bit. Do you recall your first interaction with an Apple product?

JON: I grew up on Apple products. I got an Apple II with 16K of memory and no disk drive when I was in junior high school. After my success with science fair projects on the Apple II, my parents bought me a Macintosh when it first came out. One of the key innovations with the Macintosh was the strong developer program that Apple created to encourage people to build software for it.

AARON: Your pre-Flash efforts with FutureSplash were aimed at taking advantage of pressure-sensitive screens and pen-based computing. Did you think it would take this long for multi-touch devices like the iPad to hit the mainstream market?

JON: The drawing technology used in the Flash authoring tool was first created for a pen based computer, the EO Personal Communicator. The device had a cell phone option so you could take notes, draw pictures and send faxes from anywhere. It was clunky and expensive but I think if the web had been strong then, the EO might have been successful and we would all have been using pen based tablets for many years now. A web now full of content and the advent of wireless networking are the key technologies that enable this kind of product now.

AARON: And the web is indeed filled with content, much of it programmed in Flash. But with such ubiquity, is Flash a victim of its own success?

JON: Certainly when a technology is successful, it leads to competition and Apple’s attacks on Flash and the work to add media support to HTML5 are a result of that. HTML5 may put some competitive pressure on Flash for video delivery and for interactive applications but for real interactive multimedia, even when HTML5 browsers are widely distributed in a few years, it will still be less capable in many ways than the older versions of Flash that users already have. I don’t see that Flash is a victim in any way; it’s just part of competing in the marketplace.

AARON: Can you elaborate on why you think HTML5 will be “less capable?”

JON: I am not an expert on the HTML5 standard but my understanding is that its goal is to reduce the need for rich media plugins not to eliminate the need. This suggests that it will be good for simpler content but that the more sophisticated media content will still be Flash.

A few issues that may slow the adoption of HTML5:

• Adoption: It will take time for the various browsers to implement the standard and it will take time for users to upgrade their browsers. This process takes years for Internet Explorer.
• Tools and Frameworks: It will take time to develop good tools for rich media in HTML. A tool is really important when building rich media content.
• Developer Skills: With any new platform, it takes time for developers to learn the platform and invent the techniques to make it shine. This process typically takes a few years with a new media technology.
• Browser Differences: HTML is a complex standard. Will HTML5 work exactly the same in all browsers? Will they support the same codecs? Will they render pixels in the same positions? Will some browsers support a subset of the spec? Will they have different bugs? All of these factors can be handled in simple content with some extra work, but can quickly get out of control for complex content.
• Performance: Flash is optimized for rendering and animating very complex vector graphics and lots of bitmaps on the screen. Will all the browsers perform as well as Flash at this? Odds are that they will all be slower because they have to support the HTML document model as well as the new media model. And odds are that performance differences between the browsers will make content harder to build.
• Synchronization: Flash has a simple and powerful model for synchronizing animation and sound and making sure all the media assets are available when they are needed. HTML5 has a more complex and I believe less capable model here. Because media assets will be spread across multiple files instead of compiled into a single file, it is complex and difficult to ensure that all assets are loaded when needed unless you want to start any animation until everything is loaded.
• Codecs: As I understand it, there are still questions about what video codecs browsers will support. Mozilla does not want to have to pay patent license fees for H.264 and Microsoft and Apple don’t want to risk patent liability by supporting an open source codec. Both are reasonable positions but they present a difficult conflict to resolve.

At the end of the day, it will take time to work through these issues and, in many cases, it will be significantly more expensive to develop HTML5 content than Flash content because developers will have to deal with browser differences, do a lot of learning at first and re-implement any content they already have in Flash. This is a expensive multi-year process and its not really clear what benefit site owners would gain from this transition. It will cost them more money than Flash content. There will be uneven customer experiences until developers get it all figured out and the browser implementations mature. It helps you understand why Apple feels that they need to avoid Flash on the iPhone to try and help catalyze this transition.

My rule of thumb is that if you want to displace an incumbent technology, you need to offer a very large benefit. HTML5 will offer better integration of media if you just want to add media to a web application you are already building in HTML, but if your goal is to build media content for the Internet, I think it will be more expensive to build and a worse experience for your customers. How many sites want that?

AARON: Do you think Apple’s exclusion of Flash could initiate a rapid decline of the software’s penetration and popularity?

JON: No. Flash is well established and has survived lots of competitors over the years. Years ago, we were afraid that DHTML, VRML, Java and other technologies would displace Flash but it’s actually hard to build a good multimedia platform and it takes a long time for developers to build skills in a new platform. In many ways, all the talents, skills and techniques in the millions of Flash developers are a more important asset than the technology in the player and tools. Like all products, Flash will decline some day but I don’t see that iApps or HTML5 have the capabilities to displace the core value of Flash anytime soon.

I don’t think there is any technical basis for Steve’s assertion that Flash is stuck in the PC world. Note that the Unix technology in the iPhone OS is a mini computer technology but it works well in the iPhone. Since Flash was developed, the two fundamental innovations in multimedia technology have been the development of sophisticated scripting engines and the availability of powerful graphics hardware acceleration. Flash has a state of the art scripting engine and Adobe is working on supporting graphics hardware. I think multimedia support in HTML5 will be less capable and lower performance than what Flash offers today. When Steve says Flash is stuck in the PC era he must mean that the Flash business model of free players, open content and affordable technology has been eclipsed by the closed, highly-profitable mobile platform of censored applications that Apple is building with the iPhone.

AARON: Many Flash developers were hoping the App Store would become yet another way to earn money through their games. Do you have a sense of how Flash’s exclusion from the App Store might affect the Flash game developer community?

JON: On one hand, I think it’s fantastic how the App Store has created opportunity for lots of developers but ultimately, I don’t think a closed system like Apple is building can own the mobile applications market. There is simply too much diversity in the marketplace. People buy lots of non iPhone/iPad mobile devices and Apple’s resistance to Flash will probably actually accelerate opportunities for Flash developers on these other devices. Ultimately, I think Apple will be forced by competitive pressure to open up the App Store but it might take a couple of years.

AARON: If Flash is indeed a resource hog, as Apple suggests, do both Flash developers, who could write more efficient code, and Adobe share the responsibility?

JON: As I stated before, the first version of Flash was built on a 66 Mhz 486 PC that was probably one tenth the speed of the iPhone, so clearly it’s possible for Flash to run well on a low power machine. If resources are really the issue, there are some simple things that could be done. Obviously, the first thing to do is to optimize the player and to encourage developers to create content that runs well on all devices. It would also not be hard to have the phone try to run a piece of content and if its starts to take too many resources, degrade its performance. A simple solution would be if a particular Flash movie is taking too much memory or CPU suspend the movie and overlay a resume button over it so the user could choose to spend their precious battery power on accessing a web site they really want to see instead of asking the world to redesign all the web sites that contain Flash.

In general, I think getting bogged down in discussing the details of Apple’s criticisms of Flash misses the point. The technical and performance problems are solvable and there would be real value to Apple’s customers to be able to view web sites that use Flash content. Apple does not want Flash on the iPhone and iPad because it conflicts with their business agenda of drawing a hard line between HTML web applications which are “open” and the closed censored world of iPhone/iPad applications which Apple controls and monetizes. Having Flash, which can build cross device applications that are richer than HTML but not in the Apple sandbox, disrupts this plan. Apple also wants to push video on the web away from Adobe’s control and to H.264 where they and other large companies control the patents. As an outside observer, it looks like there is some “emotional” baggage between Apple and Adobe. I’m not privy to any of that but it would be a shame if Flash developers and Apple customers are losing the opportunity to view content and build their businesses because some executive feels slighted by another.

It’s up to consumers to embrace Apple’s model or to push back against it and decide that they want a more open model like Android provides. Ultimately, I suspect the cell phone carriers will decide that it’s OK for Apple to have a high-end niche, but that they will not give control over their customers to Apple for a really large numbers of devices. For Flash developers, this whole conflict will probably lead to a better Flash implementation on the non-Apple smart phones and more opportunities for delivering Flash content to mobile devices. Apple has momentum in the mobile application market right now, but I think they may lose their mindshare leadership position as consumers and carriers see the benefits of more open models.

At the end of the day, the world benefits if there is a way to create multimedia content that is viewable on a wide variety of devices. Flash does that today in a reasonable and affordable way for hundreds of millions of people. HTML5 may do some of that in the near future, but in the meantime Steve Jobs is telling the world that cross platform multimedia should be non-interactive streaming video which is a loss to all of us.

AARON: With your Adobe and Greenbox experiences behind you, have you set your sites on the next career challenges?

JON: Mostly, I’m taking a break to explore some interests outside the computer world. I enjoy studying and designing systems. Computer software is great because complex systems can be built by an individual. But right now, my interest is in taking some of the systems experience I have from the software world and applying it to more physical systems. I’m exploring a bit of sustainable agriculture. We have a very small business selling grass-fed beef that we raise direct to consumers. I’m also learning a bit about habitat restoration and the messiness and complexity but magical renewal of biological and ecological systems.

AARON: Thanks for your time, Jon.

Next up is a podcast including Nick Cross, who we’ve featured here recently for his latest production – The Pig Farmer. He’s on this week’s A-HAA Podcast over at ASIFA-Hollywood. I also need to share Nick’s video of him doing clean-up on The Pig Farmer below in Flash.

Here’s the transcript from the bit with Tom Fulp:

It definitely made the Internet more fun and more lively. It would have been a much more static and quiet place if not for Flash… Whether you’re good at drawing or good at programming or good at music, you can inject that talent into Flash in some form to create something.

Here’s one of the latest segments from the show, titled TMZ: Jesus Gossip!