14 DAY TRIAL // Flash on mobile devices has been dead for a few years now. Adobe itself knows it and announced back in 2011 that it would not be working on Flash for mobile. Android dropped support for Flash a year ago and iOS never supported it, so it seems like a done deal by now.
However, the vast majority of video on the web is still pushed via a Flash Player and many websites still don't offer an HTML5 and smartphone-friendly version.
It's no surprise then that Amazon has been experimenting with ways of streaming Flash videos on its Kindle tablets, which don't come with the Flash Player installed by default.
The feature is powered by Silk, the default browser on the Kindle tablets. Silk's not-so-hidden secret is that it's partially powered by the cloud – a big chunk of any web page served is first processed by the Amazon cloud.
The company is now expanding this to video, by converting Flash video streams into HTML5 ones via the Amazon Web Services cloud. The feature is only enabled for a few sites, but more are being added.
"Because this feature is built on the AWS cloud, expanding our list of available sites is as simple as a configuration change that immediately propagates to customer devices and we can scale out elastically based upon customer demand," Amazon’s Kurt Kufeld told All Things D.
"It’s still early days but we're very excited about this feature."
"We heard from a lot of customers that they were disappointed when Adobe chose to stop supporting Flash in mobile devices, so we’ve since been working hard to develop a solution for supporting Flash without compromising performance, security, stability or memory," he added.
Amazon is hardly the first one to do it though, as the SkyFire browser's big selling point was just this, the ability the stream Flash videos on mobile devices. SkyFire was acquired by Opera earlier this year, another company that's a fan of cloud-enhanced browsing.