Twitch jumps on the Flash-dumping bandwagon

Video game streaming juggernaut Twitch.tv is stepping up its HTML5 game today with a move to get rid of buggy and overly-patched Flash in Twitch’s website.

Twitch has announced that it intends to replace Adobe’s flash with HTML5, the company has announced that it is starting to roll out its newly designed video player on the web. Channel pages will benefit first, with all broadcasters and viewers seeing the new look gradually over the coming weeks.

Although the voices calling for Flash’s demise have been growing in number and volume, it isn’t quite clear that it’s time to bury the technology, as tens of thousands of websites and organizations still rely on it, said King.

Even Mozilla has been blocking Firefox users from using Flash because of security issues. “You’ll notice the new HTML interface immediately but the underlying video player will still be Flash”.

The transition will be rolleout slowly, with the video controls being the first thing to move to HTML5 and the videos themselves to make the switch-over sometime thereafter. However, the gaming giant also says the transfer is an important step to releasing a full HTML5 player. According to the latest reports, Twitch is finally moving to ditch Flash for HTML5, and while it is a slow process, it will happen soon enough. However, the challenge for Twitch in leaving Flash behind is it’s used for “EVERYTHING” in the moment, in all-caps even. That means having to port every feature one-by-one into HTML/JS.

Flash’s biggest competitor, HTML5, is much more energy efficient, and handles resources far more effectively than Flash.

Plenty of other sites have already made the switch to HTML5.