★ bcdef.org ★

It’s official, hot on the heels of abandoning support and future development for Internet Explorer for Mac, Microsoft is now discontinuing support and development of Windows Media Player for Mac.

This is yet another notch of legitimacy for the Flash Video contingency, who are now fueling much of the video on the Internet, including Google Video and ESPN. Any computer that has the Flash Player installed can view Flash Video; and this constitutes a larger percentage of computers than any other video format’s user base.

It does not signal the end of WMV, but it does indicate a significant challenge for Microsoft – how can MS convince developers to use their video codec if a small but cultishly popular segment of the market cannot view it at all.* Or perhaps more damaging, why would video developers, a large segment of which use Mac OS X systems, use a format that is no longer officially supported for their computers? One can only expect that this bodes well for the Flash Video community.

A resounding victory for Adobe/Macromedia!

More about it News.com

* One could conceivably view WMV videos with MPlayer or Quicktime with the Flip4Mac plugin, but these are not likely to become reliable options for the general public.