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Flash expected to disappear within two years

The slow demise of Flash has been going on for some time now, and today we may have got final confirmation of just when it will finally die.

Encoding.com‘s 2016 global media format report says Adobe’s video codec could be completely gone within the next two years.

Flash made up 6% of mobile and web video in 2015, a significant drop from 2014 when the figure was 21%.

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The report found that the H.264 video codec has a solid and growing lead in this area, with 72% of all encoding activity.

Royalty-free alternative WebM, which allows HTML5 video delivery to Chrome, Firefox, and Opera, came in second with a share of 12%.

Elsewhere, H.265, used by Netflix for 4K streaming, took up 6% of the overall figure.

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In December, Facebook became the latest company to switch from Flash to a video player built around HTML5 for all its video services.

It followed an announcement from Adobe in November where the company said it would be discouraging creators from using Flash.

The once ubiquitous technology will continue to exist but will be renamed Animate CC.

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