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The Introduction of Adobe Flash

While StreamWorks was the first iteration of web-based streaming, it was clunky and required a lot of bandwidth for the time. This changed in the early 2000s with the implementation of Adobe Flash.

Adobe Flash (introduced in 2003)

Adobe Flash Player, originally called FutureSplash Player (originally a product from 1996) was publically released in 2005. Adobe Flash Player was revolutionary for the time, allowing video and audio to be streamed on web pages.

Adobe Flash would work by encoding video in a SWF file (a filetype created specifically for this technology), which made it more efficient for streaming. This would introduce issues, however. Adobe Flash had many bugs and security vulnerabilities such as:

Memory Corruption
Integer and Stack Overflow
Security Exploits That Allowed Hackers to Run Code on User's Local Machines

Limitiations with Flash

Flash, being an older implementation of web streaming, came built with some limitations. These limitations are innately going to come with software built in the early 2000's. The largest drawback, was that Adobe Flash required extra software to be installed on the end user's machine. A plugin was distributed, which allowed the decoding of these media files. This also meant that end user's would have to keep the plugin up to date, as Adobe would release patches to combat the issues listed above.

Example of an Update Screen for Adobe Flash

Innately, when there is something to exploit, people will try to use it to their advantage. As Flash Media Player required updates, hackers would try to use this for social engineering purposes. These bad players would make fake Adobe Flash update pop-ups, like the one below.

These fake download links would result in people downloading malicious software.

The Advancement of Flash

While Flash had many limitations, it was still revolutionary for its time. On top of what it did for video on the web, it also was responsible for these other technologies:

Easy to Use Animation Tool
Allowed Games to be Run in Browser

YouTube launched in 2005, using Flash as a method to play videos. However, this changed in 2015.