Apple Approves Web Browser For iPhone That Plays Flash Video, Kind Of

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This week Apple approved a web browser for their app store that promises to play Flash video.  The browser, called SkyFire, doesn’t play Flash video directly, rather it jumps through some hoops to enable Flash video playback in iPhones.

Since Apple mobile devices don’t support Flash and likely never will, SkyFire gets around this by transcoding Flash videos in real-time to the H.264 format.  For the end-user, when they land on a web site containing Flash video, the browser will automatically sense this and display a box with a play button.  When clicked, the video is then transcoded in real-time into H.264 on SkyFire’s servers for playback.

The SkyFire browser only does Flash video…not any other type of Flash media…and will be available on Thursday November 4, 2010 for $2.99 via the app store.  A similar app from SkyFire is already available for Android  users. Below is a video demonstration of the SkyFire browser for the iPhone:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grRDufZKFfE