Gallup, one of the world's leading polling companies, used Flex to build a video browser and player for their 2008 US election site. The main site has been built with HTML, but clicking on any of the video links will pop open a Flex based video player. The video player includes sharing features, allowing you to easily embed the video into your own website.

Here's an example of the video sharing feature:

Next Tuesday is Super Duper Tuesday in the US, when a number of states vote in their primaries (just go with me on this if you're like me and confused about the US voting process). The Flex team is getting into the election spirit on Tuesday, asking people to vote for bugs in the public Flex bug database.

The big news out of CES for RIA watchers is the news that Microsoft Silverlight will be used, at least in part, on the website for the 2008 Olympics to be held later this year in Beijing. NBC Universal, who owns the sole rights to the Olympics in the US, will team up with Microsoft and deliver enhanced video for the Beijing Olympics using the Silverlight platform.

The press release doesn't answer many questions that people have about this - namely what portion of the site will be based on Silverlight. This is a smart move for Microsoft, but likely won't have much effect on the distribution of the Silverlight plugin. For the last summer Olympics in Athens, NBCOlympics.com had only 13 million unique visitors for the entire event. In comparison, Adobe Flash Player is installed about 8 million times per day. If those numbers stay the same, Adobe will install more versions of the Flash Player a full week (7 days) before any track and field medals are given out.

More commentary is available online at Ryan Stewart's blog, TechCrunch, and Beet.tv.

Ooyala, a start founded by ex-Google employees, has launched a new online video management application called Backlot. Written in Flex and available either as a web based application or a desktop application in Adobe AIR, Backlot allows content providers to manage their online videos. Companies can upload video of any quality, including HD, and then track and manage that content online. They can restrict what domains can play the video, and also receive statistics on how many times the video was viewed, how long viewers watched for etc... Companies can also restrict the viewing of clips after they've been posted.

Because they're using Flash to deliver the video, people won't need to download any players to watch the video. The company has also done extensive work on the backend, delivering video to people depending on their connection to the Internet, which minimizes buffering.

Eventually they want to allow in-video advertising of the content as well - so if you were watching a movie or show about a warm tropical island with white sand beaches and crystal clear water... Where was I? Oh, yeah, so you're watching a movie or show about somewhere you really want to go, you might see ads for that location in the video player, or they might have a way to allow you to plan your trip in the video player. Forbes has more details on those future plans, and the struggle now to find content for their network.

Monetization of online video is something that a lot of companies are struggling with right now. I think that the Adobe Media Player plans similar advertising features as Ooyala. NBC has recently started their own online video site, trying to extract some of the value that they think they left on the table with their old iTunes deal. I'm undecided as to whether any one company will really own the solution here - I think technology is enabling content providers to create their own solutions so easily, that its likely this market will remain fragmented for the foreseeable future. I don't see a Google behemoth coming for online video - instead I see a number of smaller and independent solutions from a number of companies.

Ryan Stewart had the original scoop on this one, and has more information on his fantastic blog.

I've had a ton of people contact me lately through my contact us page showing me some cool Flash and Flex applications that they've built. Unfortunately, I don't have time to write posts for each one right now, as we're gearing up for Adobe MAX in Chicago and in Barcelona, but here are some that have caught my eye.

Portland Studios Store - Nicely done online store that sells t-shirts and a few other goodies. Backend is done in ASP.net.

Paul Yanez, who created the Apple TV Flash mashup, has created another mashup that adds video to the old Flickr UI. You can choose from a number of video sites and watch them all in one really slick user interface.

Kaltura allows multiple people to create a single video. Something the kids will like I'm sure, but I don't think its for me. They were the people's choice winner at TechCrunch 40.

Paul Yanez, who earlier created a mock up of Joost as a Flash application, has created another sample application - this time using the Apple TV UI to browse online video sites. The application is done completely in Flash, and aggregates videos from YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, Digg, iFilm and others into one single UI.

As with most online video these days, the quality isn't that good when its stretched to nearly full screen, but apart from that I find the application to be well done. The navigation and user experience is taken directly from Apple TV, which I like.

Adobe has a product underway that appears to do something similar to this application. The Adobe Media Player will aggregate video feeds into a single application. Here is a large screen shot of the Adobe Media Player.

(Via TechCrunch)

This is big news for video on the web. Today Adobe announced that we've added h.264 support to the Flash Player. There is a ton of information out there on the web this morning about this release (some good articles at Read Write Web, and Ryan Stewarts's ZDNet blog) . Tinic Uro, an engineer on the Flash Player team, has a great real world analysis about what this really means for video on the web.

What does this mean for the typical RIA developer? If you've been integrating audio and video into your application already, you can now use the h.264 codec as the format for that video. This is typically used in QuickTime video, and can output much higher quality video than you've had in the past. (Adobe will be supporting this video format in the upcoming Adobe Media Player, due out early next year.)

If you've been using QuickTime video in your RIA application, you no longer need to load an extra plugin for it. Flash Player will support that video natively. The team at Total Training was doing this - using QuickTime video inside their online training RIA. (I think they had all the video encoded in h.264 format already, and didn't want to convert it all to Flash video format.) This is going to allow them to create a unified experience for their online training application.

Some people are calling this a tipping point for Blue Ray and the h.264 HD format. (HD DVD uses a different format). That might be true. With ~ 90% penetration for Flash Player 9, in just 10 months since release, having Flash Player support the same HD format as BlueRay is huge.

For RIA developers though, this means just one thing - a better video experience inside your RIAs that are built with Flex or AIR. And that's good news for everyone.

Bubble Guru is a neat start up that allows you to create and manage little "bubble videos", as you can see on this page. The site is built with a combination of Flash, PHP and Flash Media Server. Its super easy to record the video, as Flash can access your computer's webcam easily.

The entire service is hosted, so you don't need to worry about anything. The site allows you to manage your videos easily, and provides the code for you to integrate them onto your website. (Its two lines of JavaScript to add them to your site).

There are 3 plans available for you to choose from. The cheapest plan starts really cheap - free. You can record one video for a maximum of 20 seconds, and post this to your blog or website. There's a basic plan at $9.95 / month that allows you to record up to 5 messages of 60 seconds, and removes the Bubble Guru logo from the video. An Advanced package at $29.95 allows up to 25 recorded videos.

Total Training provides training for a number of software titles, including Adobe products and the Flex product line. They have recently launched a new RIA that delivers this training over the web. The new Total Training Online system is a Flash based website, with videos delivered via Flash or Quicktime video. If you’d like to try out Total Training Online, I’ve got 20 free 7-day passes. Email me at mpotter at adobe . com for one of them.

Total Training Online is really well done. It has content from a huge library of products, with each of the chapters and lessons available in beautiful high quality video. It allows you to rate the lessons, and it remembers what you’ve watched, so you can pick up exactly where you left off. You can even bookmark lessons that you like so you can return to them easily.

The video quality is outstanding, with hardly any wait time for the videos to load. They stream without any problems – there’s no buffering at all while the video is playing.

O'Reilly is currently running an article on onlamp.com about how to create your own YouTube website using Adobe Flex and PHP. The article, written by Jack Harrington, is extremely detailed (4 pages in length) and goes through everything from building the Flex front end to using ffmpeg to convert the movies into Flash format. Its worth noting that there is a version of Flash Media Server that is available for free, which could have been used in the tutorial instead.

Add another start up company to the list that are using Flash video to deliver a compelling user experience. Kyte.tv is a Flash application, built in Flex, that allows anyone to create their own video channel and distribute it online. You can upload videos and photos from pretty much anything, your local computer, your cell phone, email etc...

Anyone can create a show or a channel on Kyte. Channels are simply aggregates of shows, and they can be either public (anyone can add a show to them) or private (password required to add a show). You can add slideshows, pictures, videos, music, polls, titles and more to your videos, and assemble them online into a Flash video.

It looks like the revenue model will be advertising based. They show you a small advertisement when you upload your photos and videos, and my guess is that they will insert ads into the shows that you produce.

More coverage is available at GigaOm.