I remember when I first posted a video online. It was probably 1998, and my video production clients had just started inquiring about how get their shiny new video on their shiny new website. Those postage stamp-sized videos were 280 x 210 pixels and blazed along the mighty Internet super highway at about 38 kilobits a second. The clients clamored to see them, but rarely could straight away. “You need to get that plug-in and then restart your machine. Oh, you’re on a mac, you need this other plug-in and we need to encode it differently. We’ll offer two versions…at least.” Online video was more an exercise in patience than content consumption. Everyone wanted online video, but there were myriad road blocks, from bandwidth to delivery systems. It’s incredible to think how far things have come in 15 years.

Relentless competition pushed the online video industry to achieve great things. Competition is great, for sure, but, frankly, at some point, monopoly can make life simpler. When Flash became the powerhouse of rich media creation and delivery, it just made development easier, period. Sure Silverslight showed up and RealMedia has always been strong in closed settings, like universities, but by and large you could count on users to have a recent version of Flash player so they could see your content. For us, and our clients, last few years have been hassle-free. We’ve been creating Flash-based presentations—well designed, narrated, animated, including embedded videos–for public consumption, will much success. Even issues with accessibility have largely been tackled by Flash so our government clients are on board with Flash as a delivery tool. Federal clients are not early adopters of technology, I realize, so bear with me as I move with them away from the fossil that is Internet Explorer 6 to where this post is going.

This post, and our clients, are going mobile, to tablets and phones, and without i-naming names, the big boy in that space doesn’t like Flash (or Flash’s parent, Adobe). Federal clients that were forever locked to PCs and Internet Explorer are not only adopting more varied devices, but I also find that they are more eager to make their content available to the myriad devices used by their audiences. It’s a little bit like being back in 1997 again. Instead of Mac or PC, RealPlayer or Quicktime, it’s Android or iPhone, HTML5 or Flash. As I’m working through how I can give my clients the content they want delivered to as wide an audience as possible, I find myself heading back to my roots; to video.

What was once so hard to deliver is becoming the easiest. With amazing delivery services out there, like Limelight and Vimeo, to name a couple we use, it’s easy to create one video that is available across most—dare I say all—devices. Rather than develop a multimedia presentation in Flash, mixing narration, animation and video, why not just build the whole thing in the edit suite and deliver one big video?

One glaring reason is interactivity. Stand alone video is linear, so interactivity would be tricky, if not impossible, without some surrounding interface (HTML or Flash) or controlling mechanism (like a DVD player). Aside from that, though, if your content is linear, stand alone video might just be the answer.